


Ashes

by Sonora



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman Begins (2005), Dark Knight (2008), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Choices, Dark Agenda, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:51:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Bruce had made a different choice at the beginning of <i>Batman Begins</i>?  Accepted everything Ra's al Ghul was offering?  How would that have changed him - and Batman, and Gotham, and everyone else - over the course of the trilogy? (now complete, sorry for the delay!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this idea stuck in my mind since walking out of the midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises - how would things have changed if Bruce had just said yes? I think it's an idea worth exploring, especially considering how the films all tie back in to each other.
> 
> I intend to take this story over the course of all three movies. Some plot points may change a lot, others, not at all. The problem of the League of Shadows destroying Gotham may be the most obvious hurdle to overcome, but I promise nothing too unrealistic!

Bruce doesn’t remember what love is anymore.

It sounds ridiculous, even just in the quiet of his own head, sitting in that piss-reek of that cell he’s come to know far too well during his time here. Love. What a stupid thing to be thinking about right now. But somehow, he can't get the thought out of his mind.

_...you have become truly lost..._

Maybe it's the faint hint of cologne still hanging in the air, a whispering reminder of the visitor he just had. The one who knew his name. Who'd just offered him a challenge, a path, a way out of this place he's sunk into. It's a good smell. Honest. Welcome, after all the decay. A good, rich cologne, the kind that makes a man smell more like himself, makes him smell warm. 

It's nice, but it shouldn’t remind him of his family, his father. It shouldn’t remind him of what love is, either, and it doesn’t. But he feels a hole in himself where that emotion ought to be, an empty black space, filled with ashes. A place where something ought to be glowing, keeping the rest of him from the frostbite of the world’s indifference.

Today's the first time he’s realized that it’s been put out.

It's a frightening revelation.

He had no idea he was this far gone, and he tries to calm the panic that swells up to meet it, think this through.

Bruce still carries memories of it, that thing that should be there, that emotion - the shape of it, the way it felt, held in his hands, how it had burned like a warm fire in the hearth on a cold night, radiating from his father rappelling down into the well after him. But it all seems cast in negative, throwing shadows against the other elements in his life, the essence long since fled. He loved his parents, and he got them killed, and nothing had ever replaced them. 

The world assumed the family money was enough. 

Alfred loved him, but the last time they spoke, it had been with hard, nasty words. 

Rachel might have at some point in a future that would now never come, slapping him, the conviction of her simplistic black-and-white world in her strike.

But even those last dying embers have long gone cold over the years, gone cold in this place, this nasty, rotting, perfect place.

There’s nothing of it left.

Probably can’t even be rekindled now.

The next day, he tries to tell himself it’s not the reason he goes looking for this Ra's al Ghul. Not because of the cologne his visitor was wearing, not the way the man spoke to him, the pitiless compassion he saw in the man’s startlingly blue eyes, not the way he’d known the truth that the man, Ducard, had been through the same hell he was currently trapped in, had lost the same part of himself that he had, and had somehow found a way to light that flame again. 

_... you may find what you were looking for._

_What was I looking for?_

_Only you can know that._

He wants the means to fight injustice. The criminals who stole his light away, make them pay for what they did, what they do, what they will always do. He wants to stand against the system that saw his childhood friend, the girl he’d once loved before love had fled from him, so turned against him, as if he was the one in the wrong. He wants what it is that Ra's is offering. 

A path. A direction. A light in the darkness that’s overwhelming him now...

_... whatever your original intentions, you have become truly lost._

Other things in life - more important things - depend on love than just sex or family. Without passion, without the clarity of purpose, without all those things that love tends to manifest as there is nothing.

It has been a long time since somebody, something, has affected him the way Ducard just did.

He dreams of the bats again that night. 

The next day’s journey almost kills him. He’s half-starved already and nowhere near properly-equipped, but he makes the monastery that Ducard told him him about befor sunset, only just, when the already freezing temperatures are falling to dangerous lows. 

Wooden doors eaten by time and weather open into a dark space. It smells of teak, of smoke and sweat, of ancient things one only finds in this part of the world.

“Make no mistake,” Ducard tells him, ten seconds before knocking him flat on his ass, the blows aching, amplified on his cold-knawed skin, “here you will face death.”

And even as his vision tunnels into darkness, Bruce has never felt more grateful for anything in his life.

+++++

He wakes up that first morning in a warm futon on the cold floor, a steaming bowl of soup at his side, Ducard waiting there, dressed in Asian training gear instead of the Western suits, one leg tucked under him, the other up, his elbow hooked around it, just watching him. Bruce pushes up into sitting, shivering in the sudden chill of dawn, and realizes too late he’s naked.

“Eat, Bruce,” Ducard tells him, and reaches out with one long arm to push the bowl a little closer to him. “You’ll find clothes enough over there” - he points to a small, dark chest above the head of the mat, identical to a dozen others set out in neat rows here in what has to be some kind of dormitory, empty now but for them - “so get dressed and come as soon as you can. Ra’s does not take kindly to his students missing morning exercises.”

Bruce tries to shake the cobwebs from his head, and sits up a little straighter. He’s not taking that bait. “I’ll come now,” he says.

Ducard pushes him back down with that same big hand. “Eat, Bruce, then come. We couldn’t get anything down you last night. You must be starved.”

He looks down at breakfast, and back up at the Brit, who’s got an amused little smile on his face now. “I’ve heard the League of Shadows has no sympathy for anyone.”

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s what this is,” Ducard replies, that smile vanishing, his voice no less soft. “Don’t ever make that mistake here, Bruce, with any of us.”

Ducard is one of the few here, it turns out, who speaks English well enough to have a conversation with him. A few speak languages Bruce has some familiarity with - Mandarin, Cantonese, French - but mostly, the days roll by with Ducard’s voice being the only one he listens to, the only one he needs. A guide through the strangeness, the comfort, of the League of Shadows’ world.

He’s a good teacher, too. The best. Others here guide the training on sword and fist and trickery and darkness, but Ducard is the one who gives sense to it, who shows him what it means.

They talk and they fight, they eat and they sleep and they fight more and talk more. The days are punishingly long, the night painfully short, until each blurs into the next, no distinction between. There’s a kind of peace in it, reassurance, a way to calm that darkness that’s been raging inside of him, and Bruce pushes himself harder, longer, wanting more. Wanting everything the League has to offer. 

The whole time, Ducard watches, and sometimes smiles, and it’s those nights he’s able to sleep without dreams.

After about a month - it’s hard to tell, time doesn’t seem to flow right in this place - Ducard finds him on a chill morning, staring out at the glacier, and asks him about his parents’ death.

It’s a hard story to tell. The worst. How he got scared at the opera, how he made his family leave, how that bastard Schill...

“Do you still feel responsible for your parents’ death?” Ducard asks, prompting, somehow knowing this without Bruce breathing a word of it. And there’s something scary and insane and wonderful about somebody getting it without explanation or condemnation. Like Rachel’s condemnation, her disgust, her confusion, the day of the acquittal.

Nobody’s ever understood.

“My anger outweighs my guilt,” he replies.

Ducard claps him on the shoulder, tells him he is going to show him the truth of it, and takes him out to the ice.

The water he’s dropped in is nowhere near as horrible as the truths still rattling around in his mind, the horrible fact that he can’t look at, but can’t deny. 

_...it was your father’s _...__

“You didn’t know my father,” he tells Ducard in desperation later, once they’ve gotten a bit of a fire going, wanting somehow to hold on to those warm memories, the memories of dad laughing with him, kissing his mother, all that love... What did it mean? What was it all for, if dad couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ , protect them? 

“But I know the rage that drives you. The impossible anger strangling your grief until the memory of your loved ones is like poison in your veins. One day you catch yourself wishing the person you loved had never existed, so you’d be spared your pain,” Ducard tells him. Bruce looks up in surprise. It’s gentle, grudging, as if this is something he does not let fall easily, as if it pains him to say it. “I wasn’t always here in the mountains. Once I was.. once I had a wife, my great love. She was taken from me, and like you I was forced to learn there are those without decency...”

Bruce listens and replies as if on automatic, half-freezing, only taking in the cadence, the pitch and yaw of the words, but it’s a comfort. Ducard understands. He’s come halfway around the world, past the edge of civilization itself, but finally, somebody understands.

That night, they camp on the ice. They brought some gear, a wind-proof tent and a few below-zero sleeping bags - _frostbite doesn’t care what kind of man you are_ , Ducard had said before they’d left - so at least there’s that. It’s all oddly modern after so many weeks of the monastery’s ancient facade, of course, but not even the latest technology can keep the cold ice of the water from his very heart. Bruce lays freezing, shivering violently, unable to warm himself.

Ducard lets it go on for a little while and then reaches over, pulls Bruce close to him, unzips and zips back up, their bags together now, and wraps his own naked form around the younger man’s.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking me compassionate, Bruce,” Ducard whispers in his ear, and his hands trail down Bruce, to wrap around his fingers, warming the numb tips. “I need you, I need your spirit. The League needs you. I cannot let all that you are be lost to your mistake on the lake tonight.”

Bruce nods slowly in reply. His neck aches from the pain of the cold that’s leeched in. But something in his chest feels warm, something that hasn’t felt warm in a long, long time, and he settles in without complaint. 

That day, when they return to the monastery, Ducard tells him to go fetch his things. “You’re sleeping in my room from now on,” he says.

“Why?” Bruce makes the mistake of asking, and the rest of the day turns into drills on the balance poles, until Ducard mildly reminds him, _come, Bruce, you’ve yet to move your things_.

His mentor has a nice room, Bruce discovers. Far better than the cramped, dark dorms where the rest of his men sleep. This one is lighter, one of the top rooms in the ancient collection of buildings, fitted with real windows that overlook the razor edges of the ice-carved mountains beyond. It’s spartan, barely more than a space for the futon and a few carved chests along the wall, a small Japanese desk with a black sitting cushion that looks far too small for a man of Ducard’ stature to fold himself into.

On the polished wood surface of that desk, there’s a laptop - a very expensive one - and a satellite phone and a few more pieces of technology that seem oddly out of place. There’s only one personal effect in the entire room, a small framed photograph of a dark-haired girl, maybe in her early teens, blue eyes the same shade as Ducard’s, her expression one of somebody who’s seen too much too young...

“My daughter, Talia,” Ducard says from behind him. 

Bruce sets his small trunk down and picks up the photo instead. “Your daughter?”

“She’s all that remains of my wife, so like her. But she blamed me for what became of her mother.” His voice is bitter, as if the girl in the photograph is a thorn in his side. “I suppose we could not forgive each other for the memories we brought each other.”

“She’s gone?”

“Left of her own volition. She chose another over her own blood,” Ducard replies, and takes the photo away, laying it gently, face-down, on the desk. “A man not worthy of the place in which you now stand.”

Bruce stares down at the picture, knowing that there’s so much more - a lifetime more - than what was just told to him. He wants to ask, but already knows this man well enough to know that it will do no good. Whatever happened hurt Ducard almost as bad as the loss of his wife, and what little was just offered of it likely isn’t spoken aloud often. 

“Come, Bruce,” he hears, that soft tenor breaking the thought apart. “It’s almost time for the evening meal.”

Sleeping arrangements come as a rude shock to him later that night. Ducard didn’t let him bring up the futon he’s been sleeping on for the past month. Told him he wouldn’t require it. But when his mentor has him roll out their bedding for the evening, he finds there’s only one mat in the little storage cupboard. One wide futon.

“What do you want me for?” he asks, suspicion warring with the sudden spike of heat in his blood at the sight of it, kneeling over his heels in front of the cupboard’s sliding door. He remembers one of Alfred’s lectures from before he went off to Princeton at seventeen, _every pretty girl on that campus will be after you for your name and your wealth. You must make sure she wants you for the right reasons._. Not that he thinks Ducard’s after his money - the man’s far too noble for that - but if there’s something else he wants, some reason he brought him here, if it’s not for what was promised... “What is this?”

For a moment, nothing. Then he hears the faint rustle of clothing, feels a hand on his shoulder and hot breath on his ear. Ducard kneeling behind him, he thinks, and can’t suppress the shudder that runs through him, the faint whispered reminder of how long it’s been since he was last with someone he wanted to be with...

“The men here are training to become soldiers for the League. You, I am training to be like me, perhaps replace me someday. You have such great promise in you, Bruce.”

Bruce can’t quite figure that one out. “What do you mean? Like an officer?”

“A general,” Ducard whispers back, and that hand squeezes down. “Perhaps, in time.”

Doesn’t answer his question. “So we’re trying to avoid fraternization or...”

“It’s too cold at night to worry about narrow-minded opinions on what two men ought or ought not to do together,” and Ducard squeezes his shoulder one more time and moves back. “Don’t you agree?”

That heat from before turns to anger, and Bruce shakes his head, refusing to look at the older man as he pulls the bedding out and starts setting it up. 

He feels like he should hate himself for the way he lets Ducard pull him in again that night, should hate himself even more for the way he seeks out the heat of the other man’s body, curls up close to him and lets himself be held. There's another agenda at work here, he thinks, one he should ask about, before this all goes too far, takes him out beyond the horizon, but he's falling asleep now, and it's too late to care.

In the morning, Bruce can't remember what he was worried about the night before, the faintest shell of it remaining. It was the best night's sleep he had in years. Whatever it might have been that was bothering him, it scarcely seems to matter now. So he doesn't ask, and soon forgets it entirely.

A week passes, and then another. The training turns from pure physical conditioning to the more esoteric elements of ninjitsu, of how to disappear while still being in plain sight, how to use explosives and distractions to full effect, how to kill silently and swiftly without being detected...

“When did you kill your first man?” Ducard whispers into his hair one night, spooned up behind him, long limbs wrapped around him. “What was the first life that you took?”

Bruce turns around, careful not to let the cold of night in between their blankets, staring up at the man who’s quickly becoming the center of his world. “You assume I have killed before.”

“Seven years away from the comforts and the simple answers of the judiciary? Yes, Bruce,” and his mentor chuckles a little, “I assume you have killed before.”

“I...” he begins, and then shakes his head, suddenly ashamed of himself for the answer he has to give here, despite the fact that always before this has been a point of pride for him, “I haven’t.”

Ducard fixes him with an incredulous look, those blue eyes almost luminous in the near-dark of their room, as if trying to decide what to do with him now. As if this piece of information alone disqualifies him from the League, from whatever it is they’ve both been slowly creeping towards together, unacknowledged but unchallenged. 

“We shall have to remedy that, won’t we?” Ducard says and then slowly, so very slowly, dips his head, brushes their lips together in a crude imitation of a kiss, the edges of his mustache catching on Bruce’s own stubble, and then settles back down on his own pillow, an arm wrapped possessively around the younger man’s hip. “Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share. You must purge yourself of it, Bruce. You must become a terrible thought in the minds of those you fight, a symbol, incorruptible...”

Bruce has trouble falling asleep after that, tormented by the thought. His father was a compassionate man, a good, honorable man. A man who destroyed his family through that compassion, failing to act, failing to save the ones that he loved - his wife from death, his son from this bitter existence.

He’s tried his whole life to be a man dad would be proud of. 

Except that everything dad was got him and mom killed. Dad was the cause of all this pain. Weak. Cowardly. Does he really want to be the kind of man that dad would be proud of, when dad’s gone, faded into horrible memories? Does he still want that approval, when Ducard is right here, when Ducard knows him and accepts him? Ducard, who demands not weakness, but the strength to do what is necessary? Ducard, who sees in him the power to do great and terrible things, and wants only to help him unleash it? Ducard, who’s giving him back that fire he once thought long-extinguished...

The next morning, a peasant shows up in a bamboo cage.

“Crime cannot be tolerated,” Ducard tells him when he asks about it, and in that moment, Bruce is suddenly aware of what is going to be asked about him.

He doesn’t know if he should be upset, or relieved.

At least he’s not surprised a few days later at the trial, after he’s passed the test of skill, when the man is brought out and a sword is presented to him.

He looks at Ducard, who merely nods, his eyes narrowed in a way that’s both a plea and an order.

 _Don’t let me down, Bruce_ , he’s saying. _Be strong..._

He looks at Ra’s, looks at the sniveling wretch at his feet, and then to Ducard.

Who’s waiting. For him.

And he feels something stir in the ashes, something he’d never thought he’d feel again.

So he takes the sword.

And does what he has to do to claim it again.

“Twenty-six,” he whispers in Ducard’s ear that night, laying naked with him in the darkness. “I was twenty-six when I took my first life.”

“Never think it makes you a god, what we do,” his mentor whispers back, his fingers moving across Bruce’s skin, flushing it with heat, “but your commitment to the League does make you better that your fellow man. Committed to a path few have the courage to take.”

“I will do what is necessary,” he swears, and bucks up as that questing hand finds a long-forgotten erotic spot on his hip. “But...ahh!... but if...”

“I know you will, Bruce,” Ducard murmurs in his ear, gentle as it always was, full of intent, and then they’re kissing, properly kissing, and everything in the world seems consumed by the fire that’s suddenly roaring within him.


	2. Chapter 2

Bruce returns to Gotham with a mission. 

One that he lies to Alfred about on the plane ride back.

He knows he should feel guilty about it, that he is betraying the trust of the man who raised him, but there are more important things he has to worry about right now.

He’s more honest about the plan.

_As a symbol..._

“...I can be incorruptible,” he explains.

Honest. Except for the part about what manner of fate criminals are going to receive. 

He needs Alfred’s support, after all, not his condemnation. Perhaps, after a few successes, he can bring his old friend around to the truth, to the reality of it all. But until then, this is necessary.

Alfred just nods along, a dubious expression in his eyes, but Bruce knows the truth - he’s been gone too long, he’s been missed, and his old guardian won’t dare say a thing against him, for fear he’ll leave again.

Bruce could almost hate him for that, the fear. But at least, for now, it’s useful.

It’s surprisingly difficult to be back in Gotham, at the family mansion. Too many memories, too many reminders of things now long gone, never to be again. The city is nothing but a hollow, glittering shell.

He’s never felt so displaced, so lost, before. Never. And he hates himself for ever wanting to defend it, for leaving the monastery and the training and Ducard’s body against his, his soft murmurs in his ear - _slower, Bruce, learn to savor this thing between us_.

He tries to ignore the dead winds of the past, tries to work.

He just wasn’t counting on how little he would care. 

Why did he ever ask for this?

The morning after his initiation, Ducard found him in the practice gym, interrupting the kata he was practicing. “Get dressed,” he’d said gruffly. “We’re going out on the ice.”

They’d gone miles, far past the point of the fight, out to some isolated finger of the lake. Ducard had found a spot on the bank, had Bruce build a fire, and they’d talked.

“Ra’s al Ghul did not have me recruit you for sheer altruism, Bruce,” Ducard told him, “although I would have taken you from that jail, brought you here, like this, whether or not you served any higher purpose to the League. You are a unique man, capable of great and terrible things.”

Bruce had nodded. “And what great and terrible thing does the League require of me?”

“Gotham, your city. Its time has come. It must be destroyed.”

It started a conversation that carried on long into the night. Ducard spoke of the League’s purpose, of its charter to bring balance back into the world, removing corrupt civilizations. Its role in Gotham’s past economic woes, its lack of success, the need to continue the work. 

Bruce knew that corruption well - the corruption that had cost him his vengeance against Schill, the corruption that allowed the mob to run the city, the corruption that kept Rachel’s “good people” scared. 

But it still didn’t sit right with him. He didn’t know why - this was what the League of Shadows did, what it was for, maintaining the balance. He couldn’t quite justify the feeling to himself, but he couldn’t, couldn’t, lead that kind of attack. Not against millions of people. Not against all his father had stood for. His father who doesn't deserve his loyalty, his love, his anything. 

Yet...

 _The city's been suffering_ , his father whispers anew in his mind, conviction in its salvation in his eyes, and Bruce speaks before he means to.

“Then what would you suggest?” Ducard asked, half in jest, half in challenge. 

“Surgical removal of that cancer,” he’d replied, scrambling for a reason, suddenly terrified. He'd said something wrong, given in to that compassion that Ducard had warned him against. He won't, he won't return to being... “Give me a year.”

“Plans are already in motion, Bruce. It is not so easily swept aside for one man...”

“You said you wanted to try something new for Gotham. Let’s try something new.”

It had been left unanswered that night and they’d retreated to their shelter and their bags, kept warm in the sub-zero temperatures by the shared body heat, the friction of skin against skin, one flowed in to the other. 

On the way back, after hours of silence, Ducard’s voice finally broke through the falling snow. “What’s your plan, Bruce?”

The League gave him six months. _Marked improvement, clear signs of eradication of the criminal plague there,_ Ducard had translated for Ra’s, _or we shall execute the original plans_. They didn’t tell him exactly what they were planning, something about seeing the city “consumed by fear” - Ducard said the Japanese didn’t translate very well, and he wasn’t willing to go into greater detail. _A test_ , Bruce had thought, _to see if I’m truly loyal_.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter, why he put himself in this position. Because here is he. With Ra’s al Ghul’s grudging consent.

 _...all he asks is the courage to do what is necessary..._

So he goes about building his suit, collecting the equipment he needs - Lucius Fox over at Wayne Enterprises is very helpful with all of that, even if he is being lied to. He spends the nights wandering the streets in disguise, getting a feel for the balance of power between the gangs and within the mob and amongst the petty criminals. Breaks in to the MCU, and installs a League-designed worm that will open him up a back door into the computer system. 

That’s easy to be passionate about. 

What he couldn’t care less about is _Bruce Wayne_. The Bruce Wayne he’s expected to be. By the public. By those who assume that they know him.

Not the one who spent the last seven years wandering the world, not the man who, so lost, found himself again in the League. Who was dead, until the League, Ducard, breathed new life into him in the heat and the blood of the League’s halls, stoked the fire in him anew, gave him a purpose. These people would have no use for the man he’s become, grown into. 

He’s not the man in the tabloids, cast in dusty newsprint across the front page that Alfred hands him one morning. “Looks like you were wandering incognito across the Far East,” the butler quips. “Like some Russian prince.”

Bruce cracks a smile and makes a joke about keeping the press guessing and palaces in Indian. Necessary, necessary until he can bring Alfred around to a better way of thinking. So he smiles and jokes and plays something of that college boy he used to be, and pretends to care about all the things he should care about - his father’s company, the family fortune, Rachel.

Most of all Rachel. Who he’d once thought would be the woman he’d marry, the mother of his children...

And while she may think he’s changed too much, the truth is, so has she. Clinging to her naive view of the world, her broken system of supposed justice. It’s made her slightly bitter, slightly arrogant, and the first time he runs into her, the contempt in her smile tells him everything he needs to know about the woman she’s become. A woman who’s put everything aside in favor of a pointless, useless, job there at the District Attorney’s office. Even those children he’d thought they might have together. Committed to a meaningless existence, and it makes her self-righteousness even harder to stand.

Bruce puts her out of his mind. 

It’s easier than he’d once thought it would be. But then, in the gray of dawn, in bed, hand wrapped around his cock, it’s not Rachel who comes to mind anymore. Not her hands touching him, not her voice whispering in his ear _not so quickly, Bruce. Savor this between us..._

He goes out that night, suit still unfinished, still in the disguise he’s been wearing for the past few weeks. Goes out with his gurkah strapped to his hip. Kills a rapist and makes sure the woman gets to a hospital. She gives him a strange look as he passes her off to the doctors at the ER, like she can’t understand it at all.

The story’s in the paper the next day. _Homeless man saves woman from vicious attack_. 

No word about the fact that the rapist died from a brutally placed stomach wound.

Maybe there’s hope for this town yet, Bruce thinks, and imagines Ducard’s whispered pride.

For the first time since coming back to the cold hollow of Gotham, he feels warm.

The Batman makes his first appearance that night. Carmine Falcone’s the target. He’s still the king of the underworld here in Gotham, and Bruce doesn’t want to so much kill him as he does send a message. A very clear and unmistakable message - _none of you are safe_.

He wants to kill Falcone - how he wants to kill Falcone - but he doesn’t. That’s not the point of the exercise tonight. Instead, he kills every other man with him, working that drug drop at the docks. Thirteen foot soldiers for the Family, one dirty cop. Falcone he beats half to death and chains him to a search light. 

According to Brian Gumble on GCN the next morning, it results in second-degree burns over half the man’s back.

Alfred gives him a disapproving look from across the kitchen, where he’s making them a late breakfast. Bruce just shrugs. “How was I supposed to know that was going to happen?” he lies.

Criminals start to die. At least one a night, perferably more than that. These are the petty ones, the lower-ranking foot soldiers, the younger gang members. Nobody in a position of power. That’s the whole point. Scare the underlings, break the power of the bosses. He never uses a gun - _coward’s weapons_ \- but favors the blade Ducard gave him before he left, the short _wakazashi_ Ducard trained him on. He’s seen enough on his world travels to know that the method of killing can be a powerful psychological weapon, in and of itself.

This speaks of the ancient. The terrifying. 

He leaves a few alive, here and there. Witnesses. For the stories. No good if the rumors don’t spread.

Despite the reports, there’s very little public outcry. 

It’s the only time his soul feels settled. The rest of the time, he just feels a howling emptiness, far colder than any he faced on the ice, against Ducard. He feels like he’s losing all that he gained there...

A week after the _Gotham Times_ runs an article - one that is internationally syndicated - entitled “Who Elected the Batman - Insane Morality in an Insane World”, somebody finds him.

It’s a cop. A thin, nervous cop with a heavy mustache, standing in the doorway of an apartment in Old Town, just after he’s finished with the occupants.

“Ten robberies, three dead bodies, one case of vehicular assault with the woman injured so badly her arm had to be amputated,” the cop says, stepping over the body in the living room with only a perfunctory glance down at it. “But that one’s only the accomplice. The wheelman...”

“Your system let them both out last week. Conviction overturned on appeal,” Bruce lets the Batman grate out, withdrawing into the shadows of the corner. “Or I wouldn’t have found them doing what they were doing tonight.”

“And our primary suspect?”

“You mean offender?”

“...sure, okay.”

“Bedroom.” And he points.

The cop gives him a wary look, drawing his gun, and backs slowly up towards the door Bruce just indicated, looking in. He holds the sidearm steady, even, as if he’s perfectly calm, even though his eyes are haunted as he comes back around. “Looks like you did a number on him.”

“I’m not a beast,” he answers honestly. “It was over fast.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that much blood in a while,” the cop says, and shakes himself, slowly holstering the gun. “So, I finally managed to catch up with the Batman, at the scene. I should arrest you.”

“By your law, you should,” Bruce agrees.

For a moment, the cop doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move. Looks completely helpless. “So it’s true, what those boys I have in lock-up have been saying. You’re the reason I’m averaging two bodies a night through the morgue.”

Bruce is silent.

“And Falcone? Why not him?”

Silence.

“Fuck. Last thing I need is a murderous vigilante...”

“A vigilante is a man lost in a mad scramble for his own gratification,” he says then, interrupting that. “This is about doing what your people cannot.”

“We have a system...”

“Your system is broken,” Bruce says. Flat. Blunt. Honest.

The cop stares at him, and then something in him seems to collapse. He huffs out a long, defeated sigh. “Ah... in a town this bad...” he says, and trails off, staring off into nowhere again. “There’s actually something I could use your help with. In the Narrows. I can’t get a warrant...”

“For what?”

“You know those drugs we seized that night? There was something else in them.”

Bruce melts away before the cop can finish. Into his shadows. Goes back to the mansion, starts a search of the police computer system that he’s now got full, unimpeded access to. It’s not hard to find the cop - Jim Gordon - although it’s a bit more difficult to find the address of the building he wants to search.

He figures it’s worth a look. Get a sample, bring it back here to the cave for analysis...

But it turns out to be unnecessary. Because that night, he gets a full face of it, a white terror descending into his senses, his body burning, burning, burning...

Barely managing to get back into the alley, put himself out in a fetid puddle, Bruce drags himself into the Tumbler and hits the auto-pilot, trying his best to give the voice-activated system orders. His words come out as a scream, the world collapsing in on itself around him, and he blacks out.

Only to wake up again in his own bed, naked, clean, a glass of juice by his bedside, a cottony feeling clinging to the inside of his head. He downs the juice - throat torn dry from however long it is he’s been asleep - and throws on a robe.

Alfred’s downstairs in the little servant’s kitchen they’ve always use for their own meals. Lucius Fox is with him, both the men drinking coffee, talking softly. Bruce pauses in the doorway, watching them for a moment. 

Fox has a hand over Alfred’s, who’s facing away from Bruce. His shoulders are pinched up, the way they always are when he’s upset. There’s a choke in his voice. The old scientist meets the younger man’s gaze, something burning there.

Bruce nods back, acknowleding it’s not his place right now - not anymore, he and Alfred aren’t what they used to be to each other any more - leaves the two men in peace.

He doesn’t need to disturb them anyway.

He knows what this is.

The original plan - before he got gassed and set on fire by some freak in a maggot-eaten scarecrow mask - was to collect a sample of whatever it was Gordon was worried about, and have Fox analyze it. But thinking about it more, running himself through a strenuous workout in the gym he’s set up in one of the larger, empty rooms, he realizes he’s felt those effects before.

During the trials.

Which means that whoever that freak in the mask was, he’s working for the League.

Bruce considers leaving him alone, and starting in to the next phase of his plan - which calls for killing Falcone, and most of his top-ranking lieutenants over the course of a single night. But the more he thinks about it, the more uneasy he gets. Something’s not right. He doesn’t know what Ra’s al Ghul has planned - wouldn’t question the man’s wisdom in these matters at all - but there’s something about it that feels off to him.

The feeling’s confirmed later in the day when that smug bastard on GCN reports that Falcone’s been declared insane, that he’s being moved to the mental ward at Arkham. Dr. Crane, Chief of Mental Health, is being interviewed.

The psychiatrist’s build, movements, hands...

 _Scarecrow,_ he thinks.

He finds something insane in the basement of the prison. Something out of a comic book. Dozens of men, a water main hacked open, barrels of some luquid being poured in. That shrink, Dr. Crane, is supervising, a sick little grin on his lips.

Whatever they’re doing, it’s going to be soon. Not in four months, as Bruce was promised, but soon.

He stops by Falcone’s cell on his way out.

The man’s death doesn’t make him feel any better, it seems more a mercy than punishment, the way the former boss is drooling and ranting and shitting himself, overtaken, consumed, by the League of Shadow’s hallucinogen. 

_...people will always fear what they don’t understand_.

He wonders what it was that this arrogant, powerful man was afraid of.

It all seems so empty.

Bruce takes the Tumbler out to a clear patch in the empty, rotting, old warehouse district, with the clear line of sight to the southern sky, and dials up on the comm unit a number he memorized at first glance, but promised himself he’d never use.

“You lied to me,” he says flatly, his voice crackling to a voicemail on a satellite phone, halfway around the planet. “You lied to me, Henri, or the man you have here has betrayed the League. Whatever the League’s planning here, it’s happening soon. Get here, or I’m going to stop it on my own.”

The next day, Alfred turns the TV on when he brings Bruce up a late breakfast. 

“When you told me your grand plan for saving Gotham,” he snaps, pointing angrily at the GCN noon news, “the only thing that kept me from calling the men in white jackets is that you promised me this wasn’t about showing off.”

Bruce nods, indifferent. He’d preferred if this happened later, but if it had to be now... “What’s your point?” he asks, and goes for th toast

“What do you call this?!”

He looks up. They’re reporting on Falcone’s death. They have pictures of it, the man’s throat cut back to the spinal cord. _At noon, when kids are awake?_ Bruce wonders, and just shakes his head. “Damn good television.”

Alfred practically swells with rage. “Your father, Master Wayne, would have never...”

“Don’t you dare lecture me about my father!” he snaps back, setting the tray aside and swinging up out of bed, glaring at his old guardian. “He was a coward, unwilling to do even the slightest thing to protect mom that night. You know what my father did, when faced with Gotham’s evil? He begged, Alfred, begged like a dog for Schill not to kill him.”

“Master Wayne...” he begins again, but this time, a hell of a lot more shaken.

“If dad had acted that night, he and mom would still be with us. He didn’t, and he got himself killed for it. Don’t _ever_ tell me about what my father would have done!”

The two of them stare at each other for a moment, Alfred shaking a little, and Bruce feels his own anger ebb a bit at the sight. He reaches out, touches the older man’s shoulder. “This is what needs to be done, Alfred. The city’s dying...”

“You’re getting lost inside this monster of yours,” Alfred replies, slow, sad.

And there it is. Out sooner than he would have preferred. But if they’re to do this now...“I’d understand if you want to leave.” 

“I promised your father I would take care of you, Master Wayne,” his butler, his oldest friend, replies, “unconditionally.”

“Thank you,” Bruce says, meaning it.

Alfred just leaves, though.

The next day is Bruce’s birthday. He spends the day working on the Batman, researching Crane, trying to figure out what his next move should be. Rachel stops by with a gift, an arrowhead they used to fight over as kids, a sarcastic quip about _some of us have work to do_. He holds the gift box, and knows she’s just rejected whatever connection they still might have had to each other.

It hurts more than it should. He tries to tell himself he’s past the point of caring about it. 

Alfred hasn’t spoken to him since breakfast yesterday. Except to give him a vitriolic speech about _your father’s name_ and _those guests down there are Bruce Wayne’s guests_ when he says he doesn’t give a shit.

But the butler’s been through enough, he decides, and puts on a tux, heads down...

And between the socialites and glitterati and parasitic hangers-on, there’s somebody waiting for him.

“Bruce,” Ducard - his mentor, his lover - says warmly, cane tapping on his shoulder as if he’s testing the weight of a sword for a fight. “We did not betray you.”

Bruce - who’s trying to school the unbidden smile off his lips - just nods back. 

Ducard leans in then, half embracing him, lips just above the shell of his ear, and Brcue feels a shiver run through him. Fuck, he needs this... 

But Ducard doesn’t kiss him. “We’re going hunting,” he whispers. “Go get your blade.”

It’s no small matter to slip from the party, from the gold glow of the old family ballroom and head down to the Cave, where his weapons are. Ducard follows, nodding a little in approval, taking it in.

“Oh, no armor, Bruce my lad,” he adds, before the younger man can retrieve his suit. “You’ll come as a member of the Lague tonight, by my side where you belong, or not at all.”

Warmth spreads through Bruce, rekindled again by the slightest touch from this man, and he didn’t realize how cold he had gone here in Gotham. Alone. Purpose, purpose he has again, but this has been a sore loss... 

He nods back, goes for the _wakazashi’s_ original scabbard, the one he hasn’t altered to better fit the suit. 

“They’re at Arkham,” he says.

They find Crane and his men in the Narrows, under the transport system, loading something big and bulky into a train car, something, Ducard says, that was an integral part of the plan. The area’s in chaos, Arkham’s gate cast open, the bridges drawn up by Crane to keep the police off the island, criminals running everywhere, steam rising from the manholes, screams from every doorway.

“Our drug,” Ducard says, and pulls on his gas mask, gestures for Bruce to do the same.

“And what was the plan with it?”

“See Gotham tear itself apart through fear,” he replies. “Crane thought we were holding the city to ransom. I do not know what he's thinking now.”

“He betrayed the League,” Bruce says flatly, and shifts his grip on the hilt of his short sword, moving to the configuration for a killing draw. 

“You must take it, Bruce, claim it,” Ducard tells him. “Mark what is yours, and guard it well against the evil that would consume it.”

He knows what Ducard’s asking. Whether being back in Gotham has diminished his loyalty to League, extinguished that fire inside of him that the League has given him. Whether his conviction has failed him in the bright lights of the city.

But this city is hollow. Perhaps it can be filled again, once the rot that has eaten it has been removed, once those millions who don’t really deserve this fate have been given a chance to assert themselves once again...

Ducard is watching him. 

And Bruce realizes why the League let him return here, take this mission. It’s not out of affection, or loyalty, or altruism, or faith in mankind, or some twisted sense of homecoming that he must do this.

But because it’s a test. Because he asked for mercy, he now must show his own ruthlessness, his willingness to do all that is needed. Take on the responsibility he requested.

So he might prove he truly is a loyal member of the League. 

Strong in his convictions. 

Worthy.

And it makes him weep inside, because doing what needs to be done here... he won’t be able to return to the League, and Ducard, until he has finished.

“Am I given guardianship of this city?” he asks.

Ducard nods. “Ra’s will let you have it...”

“Then I would not let him down,” he swears, and slips down from their vantage point.

The men Ducard brought with him, the soldiers of the League, kill as many of those convicts loose on the island as they can. Ducard supervises the execution of those who, for whatever reason, chose not to leave the prison’s walls. Bruce stays at his lover’s side, savoring it for as long as he can. 

He beheads Crane himself.

The killing goes on all night 

In the morning, when they leave, when the police and emergency teams and news crews are finally let back on, they find Arkham burning, the bodies of the criminals the League has rid them of burning with it

Crane’s head is spiked on a pole in front of the prison gates.

There’s a note stuck to his forehead.

_Crime will not be tolerated_

“...this email was sent in by viewer Michelle Hartnett,” GCN says that night, the anchor, Gumble, clearly shaken by what he’s reading. “I don’t care if it was terrorists, aliens, or the goddamn Batman. At least somebody’s finally doing something about the crime problem in this town...”

Ducard turns off the flatscreen as he comes back from the bathroom, dark hair still damp from the shower, smiling indulgently at Bruce. “You know how very proud I am of you.”

“Did I pass the test?” the younger man asks and throws the covers open, moving a bit, giving his lover room to slide into the bed next to him. 

“There wil always be another test, Bruce,” Ducard promises. He moves into the space left for him, moves into Bruce’s space, on top of him, straddling him, running his hands up Bruce’s arms, forcing them over his head, holding him down. Open, vulnerable, and the young man finds himself shivering in anticipation as those strong, calloused fingers caress his wrists, as blunt teeth scrape his neck, as that cock - that huge cock, that hasn’t filed him in far, far too long - hardens against his own.

“But for now, Bruce,” Ducard whispers, the younger man’s name like a prayer on his lips, “you have Ra’s al Ghul’s deepest faith. Gotham is yours, to keep for the League, until it is saved, or ordered to ruin.”

“I won’t fail him,” Bruce gasps, wanting more, more. Needing to feel the whole of his vows, give his body up to this man as surely as he’s given his heart to this man’s cause. He promises himself that he’ll deal with Gotham as quickly, as efficiently, as possible. So he can return to this, to the bright places of the world, where thigs make sense. “Tell him that for me, Henri. I won’t...”

“He knows,” Ducard promises, and then those teeth sink into his neck, sucking, biting, marking, claiming, and Bruce lets himself drift away into the western light of the failing day.


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re close, Bruce. Ra’s is impressed with your progress,” Ducard tells him the night he arrives at the League’s holdings up in the hills over Hong Kong, six months after the Scarecrow’s head has became a punchline on late night talk shows the world over. “But you need to move faster. Stop fooling around and finish them off.”

“It’s not just enough to kill them, Henri. If I do that, others will take their places. I need to remove the system that lets them exist in the first place.” He sighs, looking east across the glow of the bay. His body’s tired form the flight, from the sparring session they just completed, from too many nights, spent in combat, alone. “I need to salt the earth.”

Ducard squeezes his shoulder. “Permanently, Bruce. We have work here in China that I need you for...”

“I’ll make Gotham work,” he swears and grips the railing of the penthouse balcony harder. “I will.”

The man behind him chuckles, and runs warm knuckles down his bare chest. “You do belong at my side, Bruce.” Releases him. Backs away. “Come to bed when you’re ready. You have six months of absence to make up to me.”

 _If only_ , he thinks to himself. 

Tonight, he regrets ever returning to Gotham.

At least, Bruce tries to tell himself as he stares out over the Asian tiger’s skyline, feels the sweat of the tropic night on his body, Wayne Industries has proven useful for something.

Alfred had half-shamed, half-begged him to save his father’s company from the IPO. The money hadn’t been an issue, but Bruce isn’t all that keen on running it himself. Fox is doing a fine job with that end of things. The man’s been all too happy to assume control of Wanye Industries, too wrapped up in his job, in Alfred, in developing tech for a Batman he claims to know nothing about. He likes being in control, likes the fact that he’s getting a seven-figure paycheck.

But the company does need guidance, a vision, and right now, Bruce is providing that in the form of the East Asian market. 

Mostly so he can get closer to certain companies that are helping the major crime families - of Gotham, of most of the East Coast, Las Vegas, California - launder huge amounts of money. Like Lau Security Holdings. 

He can manipulate the city’s criminal elements to funnel their money into that one source, headed by a corrupt coward, one long on the League’s hit list. Two birds, one stone, all that.

Fox thinks they’re here for preliminary business discussions. No point in disillusioning him right now. Bruce left him at the hotel. Took the limo up here instead. With no explanation. It’s fine. Fox’ll ignore the absence. The cognitive dissonance is high with that one.

None of these people have the courage of their convictions.

He turns his back on the glamor of the city night, back into the cool interior of the League’s mansion. Their seat of power here in the island-nation, _an embassy_ , Ducard had explained upon his arrival, _China has always required a very watchful eye_. It’s old and dark and full of intention, the League’s garrisons and armories and practice rooms, like the one he leaves now to head up to Ducard’s bedroom.

There are men here, his brothers by initiation, by blood, by conviction, and they all defer to him. He renders the appropriate little gestures of respect back. The floorboards, teaks polished to black by centuries of passage, creak as he passes. The cool wood is soothing to his bare feet.

He never feels at home in Gotham any more.

Ducard is waiting for him there, naked, arms folded, stroking one side of his goatee thoughtfully, as if sizing him up for yet another evaluation. 

Bruce smiles back, and undoes the ties on his sparring _hakata_. Lets the black garment fall from his hips, pool on the floor, forgotten, as Ducard draws him in.

Here, though, here is exactly where he was always meant to be. 

The meeting with Lau goes well the next day. Enough to start gathering information from his company on how that illegal revenue stream of theirs works.

Enough to start tracking the goddamn money.

It’ll be easy to take out the banks, the laundering capability, the families. But Bruce needs - unfortunately - at least one person in the city government. Politicians are almost as bad as criminals, but changing the culture of corruption is essential to solving Gotham’s long-term crime problem. 

He starts funding the campaigns of a number of promising individuals. State legislature. Congress. Harvey Dent’s campaign for District Attorney. Dent looks particularly promising. The man’s got an impeccable record, an absolute hatred of criminals, and a reputation for being a ruthless bastard back when he was in the city’s Internal Affairs office. Having him as the city’s chief prosecutor ought to be highly useful.

Dent’s dating Rachel, too, which is a way in. Bruce sees the man’s name come up on the reservation list of one of the restaurants he owns through some holding company. He manages to make it look like an accident when he runs into the two of them there. Rachel’s smile hardens into something unpleasant when she sees the girl on Bruce’s arm - younger, prettier, entirely for show - but Dent is somewhat more polite.

“Let’s put a couple of tables together, shall we?” Bruce suggests without really offering Dent a choice.

“I still don’t understand this city,” Bruce’s date says - exactly on script, “Why idolize a masked vigilante who thinks he can just kill whoever he pleases?”

“Gotham city is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up for what’s right.”

“Gotham needs heroes like you, elected officials,” the girl continues, “not a man who thinks he’s above the law.”

“Exactly,” Bruce smiles at Rachel, who still quite hasn’t gotten over having her date night ruined, “who appointed the Batman?”

“We all did,” Dent declares, positively buzzing with conviction. “When we just stood by and let scum take control of our city.”

It’s encouraging. 

Bruce offers the man a fundraiser before the night’s out. 

“No thanks, Bruce. I’m already well ahead of my opponent in the cash department...”

“No, you don’t understand,” Bruce smarms. “One fundraiser with my pals, you’ll never need another set.”

Dent looks scared night of, like he can’t handle the thought of hob-nobbing with Gotham’s glitterati. That speaks highly of him, as far as Bruce is concerned. And he knows how the man feels.

The penthouse at Wayne Tower - a better place to keep an eye on the city than his mansion out in the hills - is oppressive. Uncomfortable. Everything Bruce hates about this life he’s being forced to live. 

His own stupidity...

He wanders out on the balcony, puts his face to the wind, tries to remember that sharp cold that swept off the glaciers, the way Ducard would...

And Rachel interrupts his thoughts.

“Harvey may not understand when you’re making fun of him, but I do,” she snaps. Arms folded over that emerald-green dress. 

This was coming. This was the whole point.

Bruce turns, and sighs just right, and puts just the right about weariness into his voice, just the right amount of honesty - it’s not as if he’s insincere about Dent getting elected, after all - and she believes it. Every word. Exactly the way she needs to.

 _Gotham needs a hero with a face_.

Poor Rachel. She’d never really wanted to believe that he was the man he’d come back as being. That he was still the sweet little boy she’d grown up with. The boy who hadn’t yet seen his parents die, who hadn’t been betrayed by the girl he loved, who hadn’t learned, in the worst possible way, those harder truths about the world. 

She’d never figured out the truth about him. She had never wanted to see it. Even when it’s right in front of her, she refused to acknowledge it.

Bruce would like to disillusion her, enlighten her. He’d like her to know exactly what he does at night. See her struggle her way through justifying that to herself. But for now, at least, her ignorance is beneficial. It was impossibly easy to convince her that he was on the side of her “good”. Her system. Dent’s system. 

She convinces Dent to listen, to take his money, to humor Gotham’s playboy, to maybe accept his endorsement of this college kid, that volunteer who wants to work in Old Town. His campaign staff is soon seeded with League men now, all of them pushing Dent in both overt and covert ways to include harsher prison sentences, expanded police powers, a broader application of the death penalty... 

All Bruce has to do is apply leverage in the right places. Snap the system apart. Rebuild it the way it should be. It’s pathetically easy.

It’s all disheartening. How easy it is to change a man. In the name of money, of power. It’s disgusting. How men sell their souls for a chance at more. How they easily rebuild their political positions to get more. Absolutely disgusting.

None of these people have the courage of their convictions. 

None of them are who they say they are. Who they want to be. Who they ought to be.

Bruce thinks that it must be one of the greatest luxuries of life, knowing who you are and what you stand for.

Like the initiated of the League do.

Several of Bruce’s choices for state and national legislature are elected. Protection, a shield, for what has to be done. For what Dent will do. For he gets elected as well. 

He gives a speech that night as the polls are closing, as he’s leading by an unheard-of twenty points, as his opponent concedes.

 _Things are always darkest before the dawn_ , he says on every news station in the city. _But the dawn is coming. The good people of Gotham will prevail..._

Bruce is on hand to hear it live. Campaign headquarters. Ground zero. Watches Rachel kiss Dent up on stage, practically beaming with pride. Listens to the congratulations that the mayor phones in.

The young League operative, the one Bruce had working here on the campaign, finds him in the back of the crowd that night. The _I Believe in Harvey Dent_ t-shirt he’s got on does nothing to hide that light in his eyes. He looks young, but he was raised by the League. One of the best they have in psy-ops. _No man more loyal_ , Ducard had promised him, _and few more able_.

“They’re all cowards, sir,” he says, lip curled, disgusted. “You know that?”

“It takes a strong man to stand up for what he knows is right. Most people don’t have that kind of strength. It’s not our place to hate them for it,” Bruce replies, and sighs. “You think Dent can pull it off? Or do you think I should have let the League destroy the city as planned?”

“You can pull it off. If Ra’s is putting this kind of faith in you, it means you deserve it.” The younger man say. He pulls at his shirt, grins mirthlessly. “This should have your name on it.”

“Last thing I want to do is rule this city, kid,” he says flatly, and looks back out over the room. “So... Dent?”

“I didn’t spend the last four months working on refining his outlook on crime for him to start givin’ ‘em all clemency now,” the agent says, and smiles. “He might have been a good recruit himself, if he wasn’t so insistent on the supremacy of their law.”

There’s something in the way he says it that gets a second look from Bruce. “You saying you found somebody who would be?”

It gets him a nod. “One of the high school kids, Blake. Young. Sure of himself. Says he wants to be a cop when he’s...”

But he doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. 

Because the full floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows explode behind them.

because joker cards, a forest of half-burned money, come pouring down on the screaming mass of people.

Because a woman - laughing, insane, dressed like a clown out of a Victorian nightmare, a deadly serious rocket launcher propped up on a shoulder - appears through the smoke.

“Hey Harvey!” she screams, taunting, jeering, up over the top of the confusion, and the room goes silent as midnight. Her thumb flicks up something on the trigger guard. “Celebrate this!”

Before Bruce can move - more fascinated than horrified at the sight - the young man he had assigned here is there, knocking the woman over, taking her out with a single, expert thrust of a knife he had hidden somewhere. 

Between the ribs. Left lung. Drowning her slowly.

The woman’s weezing with laughter as the paramedics arrive, as police cars scream on to the scene, as she’s handcuffed to a gurney and the red and black material of her costume’s stripped away.

The kid who was posing as a campaign staffer winks at Bruce as he’s arrested by Jim Gordon. The woman’s blood is streaked across the white fabric of his campaign shirt. Dent’s name, obliterated by it.

The woman, GCN reports that night, never stopped laughing. 

There was nothing in the rocket launcher but bean bags. Bean bags that said _POWW!!!_

Batman pays a visit to the hospital that night. She’s supposed to be recovering from surgery. Instead, her room is empty, the glass broken open, blood spelling out _HEY HARVEY MR J SAYS CONGRATS_ across the floor. She stepped in it on her way out.

“She used to work at Arkham,” Gordon tells him that night, shivering in the November air on the roof of MCU, the floodlight the press likes to call the Bat’s staining the last autumn clouds. “One of Crane’s psychology team, disappeared after the, err, head incident. Nobody’s seen her in months, but one of them did tell us she was self-medicating from the mental clinic’s cabinets...”

“Paranoid schizophrenic,” Bruce lets the Batman mutter as he thinks about it - who in the city might attract that kind of mind?

“I’m at a loss here,” the cop says, letting it hang.

“I’ll look into it,” Bruce promises.

He gets the League agent out of lock-up. It’s not hard. A few smoke bombs, a little tear gas, the power cut out, a few locks picked, and the building’s his. He does it in black. Civilian clothes. Just in case. The Batman’s not for things like this.

The man gives him the contact info for the kid. “He’s an orphan. Like us,” he says. “Orphans are always easier.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fewer ties, less to lose, nobody around to ask questions.” And he shrugs.

Bruce stares at the paper. It’s a boys’ home. An orphanage, for all intents and purposes. “Fifteen years old? He’s still just a child.”

“I wasn’t a child at fifteen sir. Were you?” the younger man asks, sharp, hard. His eyes dart around the room, emptying now, news crews setting up on the sidewalks outside. “Don’t talk like you’re one of them. You’re not. Even if you wish you could be.”

He nods. Point taken. “Tell Ducard I’ll be back as soon as I can be.”

“Bring Blake with you, or I’m going to have to come back and recruit him myself.”

Batman hammers the mob. Kills their underlings, their soldiers, their whores and the pimps for those whores. Their sons, the ones in the family business. Their accountants and bookkeepers. It’s all very quiet, all very constructive, putting out the supports one by one. 

Those he can’t kill - those who have done wrong, but not enough to warrant their deaths, and there are a few like that - are turned over to Jim Gordon’s Major Crimes Unit. The police lieutenant starts trusting him, starts opening up, asking questions, trying to work with him. 

It almost makes Bruce mad - by this man’s standards, he should get the chair. Instead, he has nearly free reign over the city, and the search for him turns up nothing. No conviction there, none, absolutely zero faith in a belief. 

No wonder it’s broken, he tells himself, when nobody’s willing to stand by what they claim to believe.

But there are bank robberies now, insane robberies, like the one where the vault contents are torched and the only thing taken are the employees’ lunches from the staff fridge. Or the one where it’s left shoes that get stolen, the vault cracked but left untouched. All the men involved found dead on the scene, shot by each other. Clown masks. Joker cards left on the scene. 

After months of searching, there are just no clues to go on. Even the hair samples the police find at the scene are to badly damaged by the green dye to yield any evidence.

And then a robbery goes different. Bad. Wrong. 

The entire building is gassed. Twenty-five people dead. Video footage - the bank manager taken out with shotgun blast to the knees, screaming _criminals in this town used to believe in things! Honor, respect! What do you believe in? What do you believe in?!_

An image of the man the police are calling the Joker. Make-up, _war-paint_ , Gordon’s woman Ramirez mutters, scars on his face as if his cheeks had been slashed open and stitched back together. Badly. 

_I believe whatever doesn’t kill you makes you... stranger_

Bruce takes it to analyze in the cave.

He can’t pull anything off it. Nothing usable, anyway.

So, despite the dead bodies being hung outside the mayor’s office, Bruce stays on the mob.

And, in their desperation, they start making mistakes.

“Lau moved it all somewhere physical, hard currency, one big pot. I need him back in Gotham,” he tells Ducard over dinner, back in Hong Kong, Fox in position to turn down the partnership offer tomorrow. “So we can take these bastards down.”

“We could get him ourselves, do this properly,” the older man suggests. “I have a man here who is very skilled at extracting information.”

“Tempting. But I need Dent to do it.”

“Trying to inspire the city to save itself,” Ducard observes. “Fascinating tactic, Bruce. But you know how weak these people are. They’ve no chance of having a free and just society without strong men, men of belief, standing between them and the howling darkness.”

“I know,” Bruce replies. 

And he does. He really, really does.

“And what about this Joker of yours?” Ducard asks, pointed. “What of him?”

“One man or the entire mob, Henri. He can wait.”

“He may not go down so easily, Bruce...”

“Criminals aren’t complicated. I just need to figure out what he’s after,” Bruce says

He takes Lau back to Gotham. Pulls him out of that fortress of an office building and hog-ties him to the door of the MCU.

Ducard’s words stay with him, though. The story he told him next. About a bandit, a thief, raiding and raping across the jungles of the Golden Triangle, taking anything he could get his hands on, throwing it away. So many dead, so many villages ruined, for nothing.

_Why?_

_Some men aren’t after anything logical, Bruce. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn._

He should have known better than to trust a publicly elected official, though. Dent cuts a deal with Lau. Extradition back to Hong Kong in exchange for information. It’ll probably make it harder for the League to get to the bastard. 

Before it can be carried out, though, the city explodes.

The Joker kills again. The chief justice, the police commissioner. Cops, just to spell out the name of his next victim with their name tags. 

“This isn’t the Batman killing people that, frankly, we all know nobody in Gotham gives a damn about,” some talking head on the national media says. “Why hasn’t the FBI gotten involved with this yet? DHS? The NSA? Isn’t this what the Patriot Act is _for_?”

The funeral is attacked. The mayor is almost killed. The entire police force of Gotham, in a full-on panic.

Bruce sees the whole thing from a room above the parade route, the men of the GPD honor guard detail trussed and gagged behind him, stripped for their uniforms. He also sees Dent take one of the suspects, one of the Joker’s men.

He barely gets there in time. To stop Dent from torturing the man to death.

“He’s named Rachel next!” the DA snarls, holding up the man’s nametag. “Look at it!”

Bruce just holds out his hand for the .22 revolver. “You’re the first legitimate ray of light in Gotham in decades. If anyone saw this, it would all be undone.”

“Why can you do it? Why you and not me?” he snaps. “What makes us different?”

Bruce looks at him for a moment, and then hands him back the gun. Wordless.

There’s nothing to say.

If he wants to be a vigilante, if he wants to lose himself in the struggle for his own revenge, if he wants to turn off the path of true justice, then he’s lost. Worthless.

Useless.

Which means it’s time to start dealing with the heads of the crime families. Before everyone figures out what Dent really is. Before Dent figures out who he really is - a criminal, like all the rest of them.

 _Without the courage to do what is necessary, to serve true justice_ , he hears Ducard whisper in the back of his mind.

Bruce drops Maroni off the top of a very tall building. Publicly. Openly. 

And goes for the rest.

The Joker’s rampage continues. Intensifies. Worsens. He kills wantonly, more people, more names for his target. Releases videos- _this is how crazy Batman’s made Gotham... every night he doesn’t turn himself in, more people will die... take off that mask, and show us all who you really are_ \- that are little more than snuff films. Taunts and mocks and burns.

He walks into the MCU one night, surrenders himself with an entire crew, grinning the whole time. 

“Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint,” Gordon tells Bruce, tells the Batman, up on the roof in the glow of the floodlight staining the weak November clouds. 

“I’ll handle it.”

The lights are off when he goes in, when the Joker is brought in. the lights are one, when he slams the man’s head into the metal table.

“You wanted me, here I am.”

“I wanted to see what you’d do. And you didn’t disappoint. You let five people die.”

He doesn’t quite beat the Joker to death, but he wants to. Almost does. The man cackles and laughs and giggles his way trhough the ordeal, shouting taunts and barbs and hideous things, half-truths and twisted philosophy. 

And then he tells them something. About Rachel, about Dent.

That they’re going to die. Tonight. Imminently. Now.

Dent is lost. There’s no point in saving him - he’s going to die by Bruce’s sword sooner or later, as soon as he snap entirely. If he dies tonight, he dies a legend. A legend that can still be used. So Bruce goes after Rachel instead, the innocent one, the naive girl, the girl he used to love...

The addresses are wrong. 

It’s Dent he finds, half-soaked in gasoline, screaming across a crude radio, _no, no, not me, why are you coming for me..._

He’s already given up on himself, too. He’s looked into his own soul and found his courage, his conviction, lacking - Bruce knows this, because he saw the police report, the one that found that suspect dead of a .22 gunshot wound to the head. Dent knows he should die here.

But Bruce knows what could happen if the cops are on the way to Rachel. If they hear that.

So he pulls the man out. Barely in time.

Rachel dies. 

Dent burns. 

Whatever good might have come of them both is consumed by flames.

Over his screams, Bruce can hear the Joker, still talking.

_The mob wanted you gone so things could go back to the way things were. But I know the truth. There’s no going back. You’ve changed things. Forever. If you’re the new face of justice, then I’m the new face of crime here in Gotham..._

The MCU explodes. The Joker escapes. Dent vanishes. Gotham General explodes. The Joker threatens total, absolute anarchy. Two ferries, full of people, are rigged to blow.

The city goes numb with panic.

Bruce pulls out every resource at his disposal before everything he’s tried so hard to build is detroyed, all the strength he’s tried to put back in this town evaporated, gone, turned black in the smoke of burning gasoline. Fox and Alfred help, pretend they’re still above it. Bruce pretends not to care about their hypocrisy.

“As long as this machine is at Wayne Enterprises, I won’t be.”

“And what are you going to do, the day you reach your limits?”

He ignores it.

More important things to worry about.

He corners the Joker in a construction site the next night, up on the thirtieth floor of a half-finished building. Kills his dogs, his men, but not his will. Not his conviction. As twisted and horrible and wrong as it all is, as sick, as demented, it remains what it is. Conviction.

Bruce can respect that. But it sickens him. The only two people in the city who have the strength of their beliefs...

And one of them is thrown to his death.

 _I’m just ahead of the curve,_ the Joker’s last taunts declare. _Introduce a little anarchy, and everything becomes chaos..._

Dent is lost. Bruce already knew that. He saw it in his eyes the night Rachel died. He sees it again, the hopeless depths laid bare in his dark, half-burned face. Knowing he’s failed. Himself. Gotham. Everything he believed in.

As he holds a gun to Gordon’s son’s head.

“The world is cruel,” he screams, and Bruce sizes him up for the strike, “and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased, unprejudiced, fair.”

There’s a two-headed coin in his hand.

The Joker’s still whispering in his ear.

_You know the thing about chaos? It’s fair._

Bruce draws, lunges, a killing stroke designed by centuries of close-quarters combat, the very purpose of a blade like his, a stroke every molecule of its steel has been shaped to perform, a motion Ducard beat into Bruce’s muscles so perfectly...

_Some men just want to watch the world burn..._

And in the split second of his death, in all those little emotions that emerge as the Batman’s _wakazashi_ opens his throat, his soul fully visible here at the very end, it’s clear that he understands, as well as Bruce does, that this is what’s necessary.

The legend. Not the man.

So perhaps he still had some courage left, after all.

Dent is eulogized, celebrated, honored with one of the most lavish public funerals the city’s ever seen. The mortician does a fantastic job on him - nobody can tell his throat was slit open. They say he died of an infection, that he was overwhelmed by the grief of losing the woman he loved. 

He’s buried next to her.

Legislation is introduced a few weeks later to much fanfare. Legislation Bruce uses his political clout to suggest quietly. Harsher prison sentences, expanded police powers, a broader application of the death penalty... 

They call it the Dent Act.

Between that, and the complete dismantling of organized crime here in the city, Bruce figures it’s a damn good start.

After the dust settles, the city calms, starts to heal, the Batman on a brief hiatus, Bruce turns his mind to other things. He looks up the name the League operative gave him, the kid from the campaign. He’s living at a boys’ home - an orphanage. One that happens to be funded by the Wayne Foundation.

Bruce pays a visit.

He finds a dark-haired teen, watching him with dark eyes that are far, far older than his years.

And he takes him out for lunch.

“The guy I worked with, on Dent’s campaign. He talked about you.”

“What’d he say?”

“That you weren’t the asshole you seem in the tabloids,” the kid says and picks at his fries. “He said... he said those stories we tell about you at the home sometimes aren’t really stories. And it’s true, isn’t it? You’re just like me. This Bruce Wayne thing, it’s not real.”

Those dark eyes meet his own, and Bruce sees himself. An angry boy, one who lost his parents too soon, who nobody ever humored, ever loved, ever understood. A boy who was told not to be angry, but who couldn’t forgive the things that had been done to him.

A boy who’s capable of endless dedication. To an ideal. To a purpose. Needing it. Needing it in his bones...

“You’re him, aren’t you?” he says, asking, not asking. 

“More,” he says, and hands the kid a card with his private cell. “I can offer you that, too, John. When you’re ready.”

Hands clutch the card like it’s a last lifeline in rough seas. “How will I know?” he asks.

“You will.”

 _Hope_ , Bruce figures as he drops the kid back off. _Hope for this city yet..._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a/n: There is a very minor mention of Bruce being interested in an underage Blake here, but I promise, no underage sex...

Gotham endures. Caught up in Gordon’s own, fevered war against what’s left of organized crime in the city, it rebuilds itself from the ruins of the Joker’s rampage.

Bruce Wayne endures. Vacuous, glib, arrogant. Holding benefits at his mansion, working on expanding Wayne Foundation support for children in the city. The news calls it guilt, for being too rich, too useless. Alfred is more blunt - _I never wanted you to come back to Gotham, Master Wayne. There’s nothing for you here but pain..._

Wanye Enterprises endures. There’s a new woman on the board, Miranda Tate. Young, ambitious, lots of big ideas. She used to flirt with Fox until Bruce told her the man was gay, and she just laughed, and asked how American women might suggest a new tech focus. Clear nuclear power, she’s pushing. Smaller, more efficient, less fuel, safer. Bruce has his doubts, and when Fox pressures him into voting for it anyway, he makes damn sure the lab’s hidden from everyone. Including Tate.

The Batman endures. Even as Bruce can feel his own body break down. The Batman has no limits. So he can’t afford to care, and ignores the pain in his legs, his knees, his back, his shoulders, his skin and his skull. Everywhere. 

Night after night after night. Spent alone, in this battle.

“Why do you do it?” Blake asks him one afternoon. He didn’t exactly adopt the boy, but he has become a fixture around the mansion. Seventeen, eighteen next month, and growing stronger with every passing day. He talks about going to college, about becoming a cop.

He’s had no idea, these last few years, what he’s actually being trained for. 

Soon, Bruce hopes, soon...

And then he’ll take the kid with him. Back to the League.

“Gotham needed a symbol,” he says, “something larger than life, something more than just a man. It needed the legend the Batman provides.”

“No, not that,” Blake says, and nods to one of the weapons cabinets in the training gym. “I mean... you know. The, uhh, the killing.”

“Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society.”

“We have a judicial system...”

“Corrupt bureaucrats, soft prisons,” Bruce says contemptuously, and heads over to the cabinet. The one that holds his set of practice swords. “Do you remember the Joker killings?”

The teen nods.

“You think he would have stopped if I hadn’t thrown him off that building? If we put him up in front of a jury, sent him to prison?”

Blake just looks torn now. “But...”

Bruce hands him a still-sheathed blade. They’ve been needing to graduate to this step for a few months. Weapons. “You have to realize that sometimes, the systems we create to be weapons become shackles. If you want to serve real justice, you have to commit yourself to something higher.”

“Like what?” And it’s both suspicious and eager at the same time.

Good.

“Draw that, and I’ll consider showing you.”

John does well. Takes a nasty cut across the arm, but Bruce was being careful - it’s not deep. It is bloody though, to the point where one of the _tatami_ is going to have to be replaced, but the kid doesn’t complain. He actually looks a bit pleased with himself. As pleased as he ever looks with anything, that is. He's an closed book most of the time.

Bruce remembers how he was at that age, and remembers to find the assholes who shot his father. He regrets not being able to avenge his own family. Perhaps it would do Blake some good to have that courtesy extended to him. 

It takes twenty stitches to close him up, and as he holds the loose gauze over the disinfected, clean, Bruce taping it carefully into place, there’s something like amazement in his eyes.

“I see at least some of your skills have not atrophied since the last time I saw you, Bruce,” somebody says from the other side of the kitchen.

Blake just looks at him. 

Bruce can’t help his own smile.

“And passing them on, as best I can,” he acknowledges.

His mentor - friend, lover, _beloved_ \- swings his cane into his other hand. Perfectly dressed, . “It’s been too long, Bruce,” he says, hungry, and comes over, runs a hand down Bruce’s shoulder, leans into him, lips to his ear. Possessive. Always so possessive, this man... “Far too long.”

Blake’s eyes are wide, startled now, watching as Ducard tips his head around. Kissing Bruce. Taking what’s his. Right here, right now. 

_Now and always,_ Bruce promises himself.

He sees the kid out, gets Alfred to drive him back to the city. Offers a bullshit explanation about old friends and business deals, but Blake’s not a dumb kid. He knows what he saw in the kitchen.

His dark eyes are full of suspicion when he asks.

“So you and this guy...”

“That a problem for you, John?”

“No,” the kid says, and there’s a glimmer of interest - _hope_ , Bruce thinks - that’s never been there before. Covering up the hard orphan for a moment. Making him more.

Alfred takes him back to the boys’ home. Comes back, fixes them dinner, doesn’t speak a word to either of them. Bruce offers the dining room, but Ducard shrugs it off, says he wants something more peaceful than that echo chamber of a room, and that’s how they find themselves in the master bedroom, on the floor in front of the hearth, picking at the remains of very good dinner.

“I am considering taking somebody as... as a lover,” he tells Ducard in front of a roaring fire, a bottle brought up from the cellar that finally met with his master’s approval. The warmth - the flames, the wine, the reassuring presence of the man beside him - fills those corners of him that have been so cold of late. “Not the boy, but...”

“Oh?”

“A... a wife. I need an heir, carry on the family name, all that,” he says simply, feeling guilty, needing to explain. True, Alfred had been on his case about it lately - _this house has sheltered eight generations of your family, Master Wayne. When are you going to get around to making it nine?_ But life was lonely these days, more so that the Batman was rarely needed. And there was Miranda now. Brilliant, beautiful - as Alfred was so fond of pointing out to him - and independently wealthy. Which is important, considering the family’s money, and he says this now.

“Ah, the burden of wealth,” Ducard says, smiling a little, but it’s in no way amused. Brittle, hard, in a way that Ducard is rarely hard with him. “A woman I can understand, Bruce. But if it was that boy I met on the way in...”

“John Blake,” Bruce supplies. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about it. So he doesn’t say anything. “He could be an asset to the League.”

“I remember seeing the name somewhere. One of the men I sent you for Dent’s campaign.” Ducard is quiet for a moment. “Do you judge him worthy?”

“Ra’s has to judge him, not me.” 

Ducard’s smile changes to something more real. “I am asking your opinion, Bruce. What is it?”

“But the kid has potential. He’s angry. In his bones. We could make something out of him...”

“I way I’ve made something out of you?” Ducard asks, but it’s not really a question.

“Henri...”

“Shh,” the older man says, and brushes short nails, rough fingers, against his cheek. “I am endlessly proud of the man you’ve become, Bruce.”

What they do that night, Bruce can put no descriptor on other than _making love_. 

The next morning, outside, under the clear dawn sky, Ducard asks him to come to war.

“I have a problem. It’s name is Bane.”

There have been rumors circulating about the masked man for years. A warlord’s daughter, loving the wrong man, a mercenary from foreign lands, sentenced to a prison in some ancient part of the world. Her child, born into darkness. Risen from the pit, the only one to ever accomplish the task in all its centuries. A ruthless, cunning killer. Assassinations, coups, genocides, anything that pays...

“He was taken in by the League of Shadows after his escape, nursed to health, raised to manhood. But he was... a failure. In every regard. His mind, twisted from his years in the pit, body shattered by a final attack from his fellow prisoners, was an affront to our very existence,” his old mentor says, an ocean more under the words, but Bruce doesn’t press. “He’s coming for the League now. He’s coming for me.”

“Why?”

Silence. Nothing. Bruce waits. And finally Ducard settles back against a tree, the edges of his sweater pulled tight around the angle of his shoulders. In that moment, he looks haggard, exhausted, weary beyond words. 

“Bane was nothing more than a reminder of how I failed my daughter,” he says quietly. “And when I excommunicated him, he took her with him.”

_My great love...she was taken from me..._

Ducard, as a young man, with a wife, he can believe, as hard as it is to contemplate. But the rest...

... and Bruce shakes his head. “I thought only Ra’s held that power.”

Ducard’s eyes stay on him, cold and ancient and deadly as the ice on which they once fought, and Bruce feels something clench up in his gut as it comes together.

“Come home, Bruce. Where you belong.” He touches the younger man’s cheek, something different about the caress today. Intimate. Ducard’s fucked him in just about every way possible, after all these years, but rarely, rarely has he ever be intimate. And Bruce feels that glow of him again. “Bring your boy, when you do. I shall have to test him, before Ra’s will render a verdict.”

Bruce lays his hand over his lover’s, holds it there, turns his face into it, kisses the palm.

He hadn’t realized how cold he’s been.

He’s been away from the fire too long.

+++++

Blake, good man that he is, doesn’t so much as hint at any trace of a prior relationship when Bruce shows up at the boys’ home a month later. 

“To congratulate the young man who I’m awarding the Wayne Enterprises junior internship position,” Bruce drawls, playing it loose and casual, a girl on his arm and another check for the priests. “His application was exceptional.”

Blake doesn’t blink. Plays along, smiles, nods, says all the things he should - his shell, his mask, pulled tight around him as he pretends like he knows exactly what’s going on. Seventeen, and already so skilled at lying to everyone around him.

“We will need him in place by the end of the week, and I’ve got a business trip anyway,” Bruce explains, “so I will need him to meet me at the airport tomorrow.”

If the priest suspects anything else to be going on, he’s got the good sense to look at the fifty grand in his hands, and not at the billionaire who’s offering it. He doesn’t judge the man - the kids here have to eat.

And Blake is out front the next morning, waiting, bag in hand. It’s a small duffel. All he owns in the world, Bruce knows, and remembers his own departure from Gotham, a bum’s coat reeking around his shoulders.

 _At least he doesn’t have to face that_ , he thinks. And promises himself that what the League did for him, the League will do for Blake.

“Driving yourself, Mister Wayne?” Blake asks as he tosses his bag in the back of the Bentley. 

_The police weren’t getting it done, Alfred..._

_They would if you helped them. But that’s right. You’d rather see Gotham run by murderous gang of psychopaths than the rule of law..._

_The League has kept the balance of this world for thousands of years...._

_What can the League offer you? Peace? Or just more killing, your own eventual death? Do you honestly think your friend, that Henri fellow, gives a damn about you? I have cared for you since I first heard your cries echoing through this house. He sees only a lost soul, ripe for the picking, tempting you with some promise of..._

_Enough, Alfred!_

“Alfred’s decided to sit this one out, kid,” he replies easily, hiding the flurry of confusion, of anger, he’s felt since the explosion in the cave last night, and pulls out into traffic. 

Blake doesn’t ask where they’re going until they’re on the private Gulfstream, taking off from Gotham International. And even then, he does it with his typical detachment.

“Bhutan.”

“What’s in Bhutan?”

“Your future,” he says. “And mine.”

It’s a twenty-three hour flight to the airstrip where Alfred met him, years ago, before the Batman, back when there was just the League. When things were still pure, clean, simple fire. When he hadn’t taken himself, a glowing ember, hoping he’d keep burning far from that hearth. That cleansing burn.

They stop to refuel. Riyadh. A country that knows how to deal with criminals, even if the League doesn’t exactly hold with their treatment of rapists. _We tried with the Arab world, back in the early days of the Caliphates,_ Ducard told him once, _but no nation is perfect._

The Indian Ocean is dark beneath them, and he can almost imagine his lover’s hands on him, igniting all those things, dying in the cold, turning to ashes in the confines of Gotham.

_I wanted you to move on, to find a life..._

When he goes back to the tiny sleeper cabin, Blake is under the quilted black silk comforter in Bruce’s bed. Pretending to be asleep.

_... I took an oath, Alfred. An oath._

_At least, Master Wayne, if you must go, leave the boy._

_There’s nothing for him here, either, Alfred. Nothing..._

“I can hear you breathing,” he says after watching, listening, for a few minutes. “And you have your own bunk to use.”

That dark head turns up, a rueful smile on the kid’s face, and it’s amazing how much better he looks when he smiles. Almost beautiful. “Uhh, is it?”

“You’ll have to learn to lie better, too.”

Beautiful. But he’s under age - by years-lived, even if he is old, old, old by years-experienced - and Ducard would kill them both for such a thing...

“Do I have to?” It’s tinged with some kind of fear. “Really?”

He’s cold, Bruce knows, as cold as he was, when he took a tanker across the seas rolling by below them, already older than this boy is now. Cold. So like him...

“No,” Bruce says. “You don’t.”

The next day, Bruce leaves him at the airstrip with a GPS unit that’ll take him to the edge of the asphalt, gear just warm enough that he won’t freeze to death, the gurkha he’s been training him on, and no food.

“There’s a blue flower that grows in the foothills,” he tells him. “Pick one of these, climb to the top of the mountain, and Ra’s al Ghul will decide if you’re worthy of the training.”

Those dark eyes flash, heated, burning, but he doesn’t argue. He knows better than that. Still, city boy that he is, Bruce can see the fear underneath that determination. He's no good to the League, though, if a simple trek through the mountains is all it takes to break him.

Bruce waits until he’s gone before finding the League member with the helicopter, to take him to the village where he can climb the last five miles himself.

Ducard is waiting for him there, out of the suits he always wears in civilization, dressed in his old training clothes. Climbs with him. Smiles at him. Takes him back to their room at the top of the monastery, has him lay out the futon, watches him with that same piercing gaze to make sure it’s all done exactly right. Has him undress and examines every inch of him. 

When Ducard finally lays him down, kisses him, fucks him longer and slower and more intense than he has since the last time they were together in this tight, dark, peaceful place, Bruce can’t help but feel like he’s passed some kind of test.

Blake passes his own, too. Shows up five days later, rangy, exhausted, that fire that was in him at the airstrip nearly extinguished by the cold.

“You know what to do,” Ducard whispers in his ear.

And he does it. Asks him what he seeks. Asks him if he’s ready to begin. Ignores his complaints. Beats the kid unconscious, using every trick he hasn’t shown him yet, uses against him everything the League will teach him. Blake handles himself well, but it doesn’t take long.

The kid’s answer rings in his ear, long after a few of the men take his limp body up to the dorms to be washed and put to bed. 

_A reason... some kind of purpose... hell, Bruce, you know, the means to stop what happened to us from happening to anyone else..._

“Ra’s will accept him as a student,” Ducard says, and pats Bruce on the shoulder as his jetlagged body tries to recover from the quick, nasty, brutal fight. “And he will see you train him.”

There’s something else going on, Bruce realizes that night, as he lays beside his sleeping lover, stroking a slow hand between his scarred pecs. Something he hadn’t noticed before...

But he doesn’t find out what it is. Not yet. Not for another month, warm by the fire of the League’s conviction. Warm in Ducard’s bed. Warm in his own knowledge of the meaning of it all.

Not until Bane appears.

And turns his world to ash.


	5. Chapter 5

“... maybe the only thing that matters right now is that Harvey Dent’s death was not in vain.”

Bruce watches the speech from the second floor landing of the east wing. His leg aches from standing so long. It always hurts when he stands too long. Years now. Worse pain than the niggling numbness in his back. His back is a constant, an invariable. His leg, on the other hand, only hurts sometimes.

He’s cold. He’s always cold now.

And he’s tired of watching the benefit. Watching the gold glow of the lights on his lawn, of the smiling faces, of the people who aren’t happy, but think they are. Smug, pleased, so, so arrogant. Watching Gordon lie, continue his lies, soaking in all the falsehoods, taking them to heart as if it means anything at all. 

Bruce half considers telling Gotham the truth about Harvey Dent. Fuck them. 

Gotham has earned its annihilation, he thinks sometimes. Order has been brought to it, but with it the war ended also. These people don’t seek goodness anymore. It’s been forgotten by these self-congratulatory elites who should have maintained it, ignored by those who could not profit from it, cold as ashes. There is light, but it is meaningless. Nobody fights for it anymore, taking it for granted, like a fire that never needs be maintained. A darker place, he thinks sometimes, he thinks tonight, than any he walked during his travels through the world’s underbelly.

But he’s got no desire to go down there. To step out of his shadows. No, the darkness is all he has now. Their light won’t warm him. 

And he knows, in a way, this complacency is a product of the Batman. An inevitability. Of a lack of balance, too little evil around to remind them what evil is. They will learn again once the vacuum slowly begins to fill, and balance will be restored. It’s a process, and Bruce understands that.

Because undoing his work here, turning a now-ordered city back into chaos, interrupting that process, means that the only thing he ever accomplished for the League - the task that Ra’s entrusted him with, the one that kept them apart - will all be in vain.

His whole life will be meaningless.

So he throws benefits instead. Tries to remind everyone of what true peace demands of them - charity and vigilance, mercy and justice. The Batman is crippled. He refuses to hand his tools to Gordon's fallen police force. Charity and mercy are all he has to offer now.

Bruce wants to limp back inside. Get away from all of this. But his leg’s flaring up, right here, and he can’t quite manage it. He leans on the rail, his cane beside him. The cane’s an inconvenience, and he still hasn’t found one that takes his weight quite well enough. 

And besides, it makes him think of Henri. Every time he has to use the damn thing.

He knows he’ll dream about it tonight. He dreams about it most nights, it seems. Sometimes clear and distinct, sometimes far and distant. Years. And he can’t shake the memory of it.

_I still think about those nights we spent here together, when first you came to this place. The first nights I had you in my bed..._

Bruce closes his eyes. Remembering that little room at the top of the monastery, the futon, his lover, waiting for him, watching him undress with those sharp eyes, sharp as the ancient ice in the mountains beyond. Always judging, always evaluating, but never so full as they were that night...

He'd almost said it. Almost said those three little words. But chose something else instead, afraid of what the rest of it might mean. What it might do to them

_I think of it too, Henri. All these years you’ve been asking me to come home..._

_Home is a good word for it_ , Ducard had said, and rose, walking over to him, behind him, running a possessive hand down his arm. _This is where you belong..._

_At your side._

_Not always by my side, Bruce._

But whatever that had meant, he never found out. Just that it proved to him now, looking back, he was right in not voicing what had lain in his heart, growing since the first night he laid eyes on that man, in a reeking cell in that Tibetan prison. 

Because Henri had just slammed him into a wall and taken him dry, taken him to bed and fucked him until morning, a kind of raw animalistic fervor to it all that had never been there before.

He’d never gotten a chance to ask about it. To understand it. Why that, why then. After all their time together, all the words, all the half-said things, the sheer violence of that night. What Ducard had meant by it.

No chance now.

It’s haunted him for years.

Bruce sighs now, and casts one last glance down to the party, and picks up his cane.

There’s no help for it now.

There’s no fixing what once went wrong.

So many mistakes.

His dinner’s laid out for him when he goes back inside. No doubt brought up by one of the maids. Alfred, he thinks bitterly, using yet another excuse to not come see him. Their relationship’s never really gone back to where he remembers it being, before he left for Princeton, back when he was still just a boy. Things aren’t exactly strained, but they aren’t... hell, he doesn’t know what to think about any of it anymore. 

Alfred was there when he came back to Gotham from the ruins of the League’s monastery. Alfred was there to take him from Blake. To hold his hand when the pain from his spine too intense to breath. To help him through all the rehab. To shield him from the world, from the nothingness that awaited him out there.

They still don’t talk much, though. They hardly ever talk any more...

Not a maid, he realizes, catching a whiff of the perfume that’s in the air. No maid could afford something that expensive.

Somebody else then.

Five-feet-six of somebody else, wrapped in a slinky black dress that’s a rough approximation of what the hired caterers are wearing for this even. His mother’s pearls around her neck.

She shies. He rolls his eyes. She smarms. He calls it. She bares her teeth, cat-like, and he can see the criminal in her.

He can’t even rise to it.

“I can’t let you leave with those,” he tells her.

“Now you wouldn’t hit a woman?” she purrs, twisting on her four-inch heels, smiling in a way that must make lesser men weak in the knees. “Any more than I would hit a cripple.”

But before he can respond, she kicks away his cane and flips out the window. Dust is clinging to the edges of the keypad on the safe, and he upgrades her from housecat to jaguar.

Dangerous. 

But like a cat, posturing in self-defense, rather than attack.

He can worry about her later.

That night, just as he predicted, he dreams about the last day he and Henri were together. A simple day. A training day. No different from the past weeks and months they’d spent together, in that place where time had no meaning. On the logs, testing Blake. Four months, and the boy’s reflexes, agility, strength had improved vastly. He was...

But then Bruce wakes, the smell of fire, of gunpowder, of the fucking brimstone of hell itself in his nose, and he’s sweating, fighting the covers, his back screaming at the reminder of how it was broken.

Years. Like it was yesterday.

He limps down to the kitchen, down to where Alfred is finishing up his own breakfast. The butler’s eyes meet his own, and he just heads back to the pantry.

“Trouble sleeping, Master Wayne?” he asks. “Dreams again?”

“Dreams,” he confirms.

They leave it at that. Like they do with everything else. Bruce is never sure these days if that means Alfred understands him, or Alfred doesn’t care.

But he’s living in a tomb these days. Everything in it dead, including himself. The cold of it all suffusing him. And Alfred is the only thing alive in it any more.

Even if he does keep pestering him about...

“Miranda Tate was here last night,” he says as he starts cracking eggs. “She was asking about you.”

Bruce just shakes his head, and tries to smile. “I’ve got nothing to offer her, Alfred.”

“She’s very beautiful. You can’t stay locked up in here forever.”

“Alfred, I... I had someone,” he says quietly, and remembers the way Henri touched him that night, the long slide of a hilt-calloused palm down his arm, a slick of fire in it’s wake. And Alfred’s looking at him, concern in his eyes, concern that hasn’t been there since those days when Bruce first came home, was screaming in pain through the morphine. “I had a life.”

The butler, his old caretaker. “Yes, I know,” he says, and it sounds like an admission he doesn’t want to make, “and you lost him. You hung up your cape and cowl, but you never moved on. You never found a life...”

He feels a tremor of pain wrack him, and drops his gaze. “There’s nothing for me out there.”

“Bruce, if you would just...”

“Alfred, enough!” he snaps, and feels another twinge of pain as he pulls himself up, falls back against the wall. “Just... just stop. I know you hated him. I know you’re probably relieved that he’s gone, that I’m back here...”

“Do you remember when you left? Before the League, before the Batman, before all of this?” Alfred says. “I never wanted you to come back to Gotham, Master Wayne,” Alfred finishes, broken, and drops a pat of butter into a small pan. “I always knew there was nothing for you here. When you left this last time... I... I hoped you’d stay. Wherever it was the League had taken you. Your... your Henri.”

Bruce frowns. “Alfred, but you hated Henri...”

“I thought... I thought that man was only taking advantage of you, that he was using your need against you, seduced you to bring you into the League, and then you were destroying yourself with this Batman monster of yours, just to prove yourself to him. Leading my precious boy down some horrible road. Wanting you to become just like him...”

Bruce swallows. “Alfred, he didn’t pick me. He didn’t. And Bane... Bane’s the League now. Not me. You spent all those years trying to keep me from him for no reason. You were right,” and he tries to force a smile, but it only twists into something sad, weak. He remembers the way Henri fucked him that night... 

... like he was nothing. 

“He was just using me.”

Alfred doesn’t say anything more, just finishes that omelet in silence, leaves it, leaves. Bruce doesn’t say anything either.

He can’t, won’t, never...

_I have come for you, Ra's. You alone. Fight me, face me, you coward!_

_Henri, what is he talking about? Ra's... you?_

He can still remember the expression in the eyes of the man he loved, who's never shown any sign of loving him. Confusion. Like he couldn't figure out why Bruce was asking. Like this was something he should have known all along. _Bruce..._

_What?_

_Give me your sword,_ he'd asked, instead of whatever else he was going to say. His fingers had run over Bruce's as the weapon had been handed over, his eyes softer than they'd ever been, almost gentle. Kind. Fond. Almost... almost loving...

It was the last time they'd ever touched. 

He'd long questioned what he'd seen there in Henri's face. 

He had, after all, seen the man he'd loved killed less than three minutes later. Had his back broken four minutes after that. 

Those memories... those couldn't be the most reliable he had.

And then the doorbell rings.

And then Alfred is there. Neutral. Expressionless.

“Blake,” he says.

And Bruce hobbles to his feet.

Another traitor, this one, John Blake. The boy who had so much promise. The boy he hasn’t seen since that day, who hasn’t come by, hasn’t called, hasn’t shown his face anywhere. The boy who should have been initiated, made himself a cop instead, a part of that pack of blind cowards running this city...

“What can I do for you, officer?” he asks, easing himself into a chair in the west wing sitting room. He chose this place for a reason - it’s where he keeps his weapons collection.

Blake’s eyes are hard as flint. He’s older. He’s still a beautiful as he was back then. But he’s cold too. Whatever hope he’d carried as a teenager extinguished. 

Gone, maybe, in Bane's assault on the League's monastery. In the fight. Everyone gunned down. Ducard with his neck snapped, laying on the floor of his house, on fire. Bruce powerless to help, sword knocked away, overpowered, broken apart, saved only by this young man, who'd somehow managed to carry him off the mountain, after Bane's men had left. Brought him back to Gotham...

_...don't die on me, Bruce. Please don't die..._

... and never spoken to him again, before today. Before this.

Bruce knows how he feels. He doesn't blame him for this. No matter how much he hates seeing that uniform on him. He can't blame him for it.

It's not like he has anything to offer him anymore. At least the GCPD could provide the illusion of purpose.

“Commissioner Gordon’s been shot,” he says, short, ignoring the jab. 

He talks about the tunnels, then. About an underground army, works, orphans being killed. About details being ignored, needing attention, needing his help. Not just the Batman. Bruce Wayne. The League’s Bruce Wayne.

Bruce just shakes his head. He remembers how proud Blake was of himself, those months in the mountains. What a fighter he’d been. The fear in his eyes, as he’d knocked him from the logs, into the water below and told him to stay out of sight. 

As he’d faced the doors, the swirling flurries of snow.

As Bane came for them. 

For Henri.

_Hello, Ra’s! I have come to take back from you what is rightfully mine..._

“Gotham still needs the Batman,” Blake says quietly. “He’s gotta come back.”

“John,” he starts. “John, you have to understand...”

The kid’s standing now, the black collar of his police shirt high against his pale throat, shaking, just a little. Bruce can remember what he looked like in a different black, in a different uniform, in a different world. A different life. A better one.

“Bane broke your back, destroyed the League, killed your lover, whatever,” the kid grinds out, angry again, and he was always angry, wasn’t he? “But you’re still here. Gotham still needs you. I still...” and he fumbles to a stop, barely breathing, pulling back without moving.

And he can feel that inside of him. Like broken glass. Tearing, crumbling...

Bruce stands up, steps forward, puts out a hand. It barely registers that he’s not using his cane. Blake’s eyes go wide, then narrow, backing up.

He hits a wall, and Bruce’s hand lands beside his ear. He’s still not breathing. Panicked little inhales. Nothing released. Nothing ever released.

Bruce remembers the way he felt that night on the airplane out of Kolkata, curled in his arms, soft in sleep. How he felt on the way home, holding his hand, lips on his forehead, telling him it would all be okay, that he wasn’t going to die...

_...please don’t die on me, Bruce. Please..._

He’d been so scared. He was still scared. Bruce could see it in him now. So, so scared...

Their eyes lock.

Bruce can’t help himself.

Leans in, and kisses him.

Blake makes a little noise, a little inhale of surprise, but lets Bruce in. Parts his lips and lets his head fall back against the wall, brings up a hand to twine into Bruce’s hair, holding him there. Their teeth clash, but there’s no violence in this, just a slow, slow slide of lip and tongue, of a promise he’d believed long since burned away to nothing.

A promise he suddenly wishes - for the first time in years - that he could still find a way to keep.

He holds onto Blake as long as he can. The kid’s so warm. God, why is he still warm? How can he be this warm? In the police, in the MCU, Gordon’s pet unit, in a city that’s forgotten that the war never ends, that it can never be eliminated, that there’s always something, someone, needing protection, even when the surface looks so calm...

_An underground army..._

He pulls away then, rubbing Blake’s shoulder, and the kid just buries his face in his neck, and won’t let go. _The boy_ , he thinks, _who crawled in your bed that night_.

Still needing something from him. Still needing him. 

Even if Ducard was getting ready to toss him away...

“Details?” Bruce asks softly.

“I’ve got five hundred miles of tunnel and no idea where to start,” Blake says, and unwinds himself from Bruce. Locks that warmth up. Pulls his own mask back on. That ever-present hint of anger. Cold again. “I could use the help.”

Bruce finds Alfred after Blake leaves.

“I need to talk to Fox,” he says. “Do we still have any cars around the place?”

“One or two,” Alfred says, and smiles.


	6. Chapter 6

Blake doesn’t have much hope, leaving Wayne Manor, that he can actually drag Bruce back into the world.

He doesn’t have much hope left for Bruce at all.

It’s a testament to how much he believes in the man that he came here at all today.

He wishes he could still hope, like he used to hope when he was still that stupid teen - god knows how much Gotham still needs the Batman. Needs the League. Needs _Bruce Wayne_. 

He knows this. Even if the mayor and Captain Foley and his partner and every-fucking-one else don’t know it, think the war is over, Blake’s not wrong. After all, didn’t catch Commissioner Gordon up on the roof the other night, staring longingly at the old floodlight, drinking his coffee, reading case files?

Like they were still at war.

He’s said so, and the older man had laughed it off.

But they both knew it was the truth.

Even if the most important case of the last year or so was the Senator's kidnapping.

The war, the real war, the League's war for the soul of civilization, is never over.

Which was why Commissioner Gordon is in the hospital now. 

Why Blake’s so desperate right now that he’d come up here to talk to some broken shell of a man. On the basis of hope. Which he’s tried to ignore for years.

Bruce Wayne.

It hurts to see him this shattered.

It’s more than just the injuries from that brutal fight that afternoon in the monastery, the one where the man he’d always seen as invincible was taken about by some inhuman monster in a mask. More than just the lingering pain of his spine, or in his torn left ACL, or the severe concussion that had almost killed him. No, Bruce isn’t broken in body alone. There’s something else wrong with Bruce.

It’s got something to do with Ra’s, Blake knows. That razor’s edge of an Englishman who Bruce had been sleeping with. It had been obvious to Blake that summer, even through the pain and misery of the training. Obvious to everyone else, too. Although nobody really knew what it was about.

The other men had talked about it in hushed whispers. How Ra’s had taken Wayne in, given him purpose again, won his loyalty. How some of them thought it was just a way to use Wayne - _what else is a princeling like that good for?_ \- and others, who remembered Bruce’s own training, believed Ra’s had a purpose in mind for Bruce - _he’s positioning his successor, you idiots, can’t you see that_?

Blake had just felt jealous. 

That Bruce could have something like that, on top of everything else.

But even then, he knew better than to envy the man. He hadn’t spent years sparring in Bruce’s gym and swimming in Bruce’s pool and eating breakfast in Bruce’s kitchen to not know a little bit about the man himself. To not have picked up from Alfred snatches of stories of happier times, from before, of the miserable years that followed after. To not have seen the way Bruce never so much as glanced at the wealth around him, the history of his family, so rich in than mansion, as distant from him as if it were behind museum glass.

To not have recognized, in its sheer unfamiliarity, the peace that seemed to suffuse him at the League’s training monastery.

So he’d never made the mistake, like everyone else did, of thinking Bruce was a product of his environment in Gotham. No, he had been at home in the mountains. That was where he wanted to be. That world - of shadow and seduction and darkness and terrible purpose - was where he belonged. Where he was meant to be.

No, the wealth that surrounded Bruce offered him no comfort. Nothing here in Gotham gave him a moment’s peace. There was no light, no warmth, no meaning in this world.

Only the League had ever given Bruce that.

Only Ra’s.

Blake had hoped he might be part of that someday. That he might have a place in the League of Shadows. Have a purpose, something beyond this rotten existence here in Gotham, just surviving. Crawl up out of the pit of his own fucking life, the depths of the abyss of fate, of his dad's selfishness and addictions and failure, find a place for himself, do something noble.

Spend his life, maybe, at Bruce’s side. The way Bruce had spent his life at Ra’s side.

But Bane had killed more than just Ra’s that day, and Bruce... well, Bruce may be broken beyond repair now.

Blake still doesn’t know. He hopes not. He’s spent years hoping not, even as he couldn’t let himself believe it, even as he let that ever-present anger in him pull him away from the broken promise that Bruce Wayne had become, even as he moved on, pushed ahead, tried to find his own path through college and the police force, tried to find meaning.

He might hate himself for it, but he still has hope.

Because he’d believed once. In the Batman, in the League of Shadows. Because he’d believed in Bruce Wayne, the man, the orphan, just like himself, who’d found a way to turn all the darkness in his life against itself, to punish evil without becoming evil, to descend into the pit, and come through whole, triumphant, a better man. Somebody who fucking matters in this fucked-up world.

Even if Bruce doesn’t believe that he’s still that person, Blake still does.

Still hopes.

Because even though the man who took Bruce for a lover is gone, who trained him and taught him and brought him up from the pit of his own despair, Ra’s isn’t. 

Blake knows that.

That the man he’d fallen in love with himself that summer... isn’t gone.

No matter how much Bruce Wayne likes to pretend that he is.

That he’s broken beyond recall, the Batman long-perished.

That the world burnt to the ground, Gotham nothing more than ashes, the darkness an encroaching thing that will reclaim him. Carry him back into the nothingness of his own despair. 

That Bane is now rightful leader of the League of Shadows.

That Bruce Wayne was never meant to replace Henri Ducard as Ra’s al-Ghul. 

Nobody ever told him any of that. But some things are just apparent. This one was obvious, from the moment Blake saw the way Ra’s was looking at Bruce in those moments during training, when Bruce was working with him, focused, not paying attention to everything his master was...

 _If he comes back..._ he tells himself as he drives away and falters. Not wanting to think of the rest, the way he felt as a teenager, that night Bruce slept with him on the plane, how warm he was, how that fire in the older man seemed hot enough to burn the weakness that was _John Blake_ away and replace it with something better. He can’t. 

He can’t remember how much he loved this man.

It’ll destroy him. Like Bruce’s love for Ra’s destroyed him.

_If he doesn’t, then fuck him..._

He pushes on the tunnel issue with the boys at the station, with his partner, with his superiors.

They all tell him he’s full of shit, that he’s imagining things that can’t happen, that it’s insane to think about shit like that.

The guys are watching the news in the breakroom over bad coffee. The protests that are starting up over the problems with the economy again. It’s the same old story as always.

Wayne Enterprises apparently sunk a huge amount of money into some fucking top-secret green energy project a few years ago, after Bruce dropped out of the company and some woman from Europe took over. The thing’s never been turned on. Bruce apparently still had enough influence to stop it from happening. But it’s tanked the economy in Gotham now, as well as in the state in general, spreading nationally, and protests are starting up. 

Screaming about the evils of capitalism. The need for state control of certain industries. How unfair it all is that some people starve while others feast.

The talking heads on one network are accusing big donors of backing the movement. The talking heads on another are proclaiming it to be spontaneous, a true expression of the anger of the general population. 

Blake turns it off, and tells them all he’s going home.

The world’s not fair. Never has been. Never will be. That’s not Bruce’s fault or that woman - whatshername, Miranda Tate - or a company’s fault or anyone else.

If anything, it’s the fucking criminals, the men given over to evil, to irrational hatred, to ideologies that allow abuses of any kind, or no ideology at all, that make these sorts of things happen.

 _Ra’s al-Ghul_ , he thinks, _was right about this fucking city._

There’s a quote on the wall of the station. On the plaque that’s dedicated to Harvey Dent - every station in the city has one, Gordon’s insistence, a private donor’s money. Probably Bruce’s. It’s a nice plaque. It’s a simple quote.

_It’s always darkest before the dawn._

Blake goes home, and gets drunk, and looks at the tunnel schematics again.

Fuck. It’s going to take a lot of work to flush these things clean.

He pushes on the tunnel issue with Commissioner Gordon. 

He gets promoted.

To detective. Over the top of Captain Foley’s protests. Under Gordon’s direct supervision.

Just like that.

It’s not unexpected, really. Actually, it’s about goddamned time. But Blake hasn’t been one to ever take anything for granted - not even things most people would feel that they’re owed, because when was the last time the world gave him anything? - so he just nods back and tries to remember if he’s got any suits at home.

“Remember when you asked me,” Gordon tells Blake, after Foley’s dismissed and he’s summoned closer, “if I ever wanted to know who the Batman was?”

“Yeah...”

“He came here, last night,” the commissioner says. He’s not very coherent right now. Keeps slipping in and out, and his meeting with Foley must have taken a lot out of him. Blake doesn’t hold that against him. If anything, Gordon’s the only person he knows who he admires - _used to admire, fuck, John_ \- even half as much as Bruce Wayne, as the Batman. “Came to ask me... ask me...”

“Ask you what, sir?”

“If the Batman still existed, if he could come back. But he has to come back. This evil, rising from the sewers...”

Blake just squeezes his new boss’ hand, not letting out any of the sudden, radiant, childish glee that wells up in his gut. 

The Batman came here.

Maybe, maybe his hope is...

There’s a hit on the stock exchange. 

The Batman shows up. 

Gotham explodes.

But they don’t know what Blake knows.

Blake’s there. He sees the man on the bike, tearing over barriers, using human shields to cover his escape. It’s Bane. Has to be. Unmistakable. Nobody else wears a mask like that. 

His blood goes cold when he sees the man, memories of that day, all these years ago, the carnage, the way the smoke smelled, his own fear when Bruce... but he shoves it out of his mind, yells at Foley that they need to follow the criminals, not the Batman.

It takes all his willpower not to just kill the bastard and make the pursuit himself, but he keeps himself in line.

The Batman barely gets away. Blake watches the stealth helicopter - or whatever the fuck that thing just was - tear off between the buildings in a whir of triumphant roter wash, and he wonders if Bruce knows, if Bruce saw, if Bruce is going to be able to handle facing the man who killed his lover, all those years ago.

He never gets a chance to ask.

The next day, Bruce’s fortune implodes. Whatever the fuckers did at the exchange, it has to do with Bruce. It doesn’t quite touch the Wayne trust funds, or the property holdings, but his controlling interest in his own company is gone. Seized by the stockholders in some nightmare of a deal that Blake can’t quite wrap his head around. He eats a bowl of cold cereal on the crappy little couch in his crappy little apartment, still sweating from his morning workout, and wonders how in the hell this happened. Why.

By the time he showers, puts on his only decent suit - he really needs to do some shopping - and heads in to the MCU, they’re announcing that Bruce Wayne has completely lost control.

He tells Gordon he’s following a lead, and heads over to Wayne Tower to see what the hell is going on.

Bruce looks better than he did a few days ago, when Blake offers him a ride. The beard’s gone, that haunted look has almost vanished from his eyes... but he’s still empty. He hasn’t pulled himself out of whatever hole he’s fallen into.

Blake has to resist the urge to pull the car over and kiss him. Strip them both naked and let Bruce fuck him until that grief finally dies. Let him know he’s not alone. That he still has somebody who wants...

But he doesn’t give voice to any of that.

“I could use some help,” he says quietly. “Looking for Bane.”

“You think he’s in the tunnels?”

“That would make sense. Gordon’s underground army...”

Bruce just settles back against the door, like leaning into the cushion of the seat’s too comfortable and he can’t abide that right now. “If Bane is here, you need to get as far away from this city as possible, John.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. But Blake remembers the stories the League soldiers told him that summer. About Ra’s, about Gotham... and suddenly, he’s mad again. What the fuck is wrong with Bruce? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he know? The destruction of Gotham, the administration of League justice, is his responsibility and his alone.

Not Bane’s.

His.

As...

“So what, you’re just going to let him do this? Going to let him destroy Gotham?”

“I already stopped the League from doing it once. An indulgence, maybe, from Henri, I don’t know,” he says, and he still sounds broken. _Fuck_ , Blake thinks. “It’s Bane’s purview now.”

“Bruce, come on. You think Ra’s really would have wanted that asshole running the League, especially after he fucking killed...”

“I’m serious, Blake,” he snaps. “You get as far away from here as you can. Take anybody you care about with you, and don’t look back.”

He doesn’t bother asking what Bruce is going to do.

He tries to tell himself he doesn’t care.

Still, he asks Bruce where he wants to go, and the older man just shifts, uncomfortable, and says he can’t deal with being at the mansion tonight. 

Against his better judgment, Blake finds himself pulling up along the street in front of his own place, just as it’s getting dark enough for nobody to see who’s getting out of his car, who’s walking down the steps with him, who’s waiting, smiling a fond, faraway little smile as he digs his keys from his pocket in the brazen half-light of the dying bulb next to the door.

“It’s a shitty basement apartment...”

“It’s fine.”

They stand there in his dark little living room for a while, not talking, the glow of that bulb outside the only illumination in the cramped, dark space. It makes Bruce look ghostly. Like a phantom, a shadow of his former self, of whoever it was he once had it in him to be, and it occurs to Blake, probably for the first time in his life, that Gotham is fucked. Alone. Abandoned.

Just like they are.

That it’s the city that did it to them, this fucking city, and maybe it deserves whatever the League’s going to dish out under Bane’s careful insanity, maybe it deserves its end...

Bruce moves, steps into his space, runs cold fingers down his cheek, down his neck, crooking into the knot of his tie, pulling down, pulling in. 

Pulling _him_ down, pulling _him_ in. Magnetic. Undeniable.

And right now, Blake wants to follow him, wants to believe in him so goddamned badly, wants anything, anything to take him out of this numbness he's lived in, since the day Bane destroyed that beautiful world he never got to know...

“I’m not Ra’s,” he whispers, not really knowing why he says it. Why he sounds so scared as he does. Maybe because he never really wanted to leave Bruce, walk away from him like he did. But he couldn’t let himself, couldn’t let himself get sucked into the depths with him. He wouldn’t have been strong enough to swim them both back up to the surface. Bruce could have done that, Bruce could have saved them from whatever fucking netherworld this is they've both been living in the last few years., Bruce could have, and chose to let them both sink. Instead of... “I can’t be that for you.”

“Ra’s?” And Bruce's eyes narrow.

 _Shit_ , Blake thinks, _shit, what’s wrong with you, you shouldn’t have said that..._ “I remember how he looked at you, Bruce.” And Bruce’s eyes have gone blacker, emptier, than should be possible for a mortal’s, and Blake reaches for something else to say. “Fuck,” he settles, forcing a weak smile, “you don’t think the whole place didn’t hear you two at night? Thought... thought I was real brave, crawling into your bed that one time, but I had nothing on him, right? I mean, you were his fucking heir. Wasn't like I had anything to offer you like that...”

The words fail him then. Fall apart. He doesn't know what he was just trying to say. Why he feels like this. What this even is.

Bruce doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. His finger doesn’t waver from the top of Blake’s tie, though. Holding on. Just...

And then he leans in. Runs his free hand into Blake’s pants. Does... something. Blake groans. It’s like fire, that touch...

“Where's your bed?” he growls - quiet, deliberate. His mouth on Blake’s ear, all teeth, no kindness at all.

Blake tells him. 

He used to fantasize about Bruce Wayne. Like this. When he was a kid, just a teen, another angry little boy in a world of angry little boys. When he got to know the man a little better, when he started spending weekends at his place, when Bruce decided to take him on as a student, when Bruce took him to the mountains and showed him the secrets that lived in the shadows there. He’s wanted to fuck the man for as long as he could remember, for as long as he’s known what fucking was. Wanted to kiss and bite and scratch and buck and sweat and moan and scream. Wanted to feel the man’s cock inside of him, take him in, feel the heat of him, scorching through to his very soul, branding him from the inside out.

It seems like he gets all that. And more. And he clings to it for as long as he can, feeling more full, more whole, than he has since the time he left this man to his injuries, to his despair, as he walked away, burning with the heat of an anger that’s never, never kept him warm like this...

But when he wakes up in the morning, still loose and slick, a ring of bruises around his throat and on his chest, hints of blood under his own blunt fingernails, the sheets torn loose from the mattress, he’s cold again.

Bruce is gone.

Nobody sees him for a week.

And when he finally catches up to the Cat, Selina Kyle, the woman who took the Senator, he almost gets an answer.

_You should be as afraid of him as I am._

Blake knows Gotham’s rogues gallery at this point. She doesn’t look like she fits into it.

She looks... scared. 

“Did they kill him?” he asks.

Her answer is biting, short, tense. “I don’t know.”

He puts her in prison. Goes home, doesn’t eat dinner, drinks too much, goes to sleep.

In his dreams, shallow and disturbed as they are, he can still feel Bruce fucking him.

Blake promises himself he’s going to go find him. Give up his badge, go wherever he has to go, do whatever he has to do, to get Bruce. Bring him back up, where they can both be warm...

But then other things intrude.

But then Bane pulls that shit with the nuke.

It feels good, having something again that justifies his anger.


	7. Chapter 7

Here, it’s dark.

Cold.

Damp.

Like that jail that Henri... that Ra’s... found him in, all those years ago. The stone belly of his own despair, threatening to devour him.

Ra’s had save him from that, though. The League had saved him. Given him something to believe in. Given him hope.

Maybe it was appropriate that it was the League that had taken it away from him again.

He feels like an old, old man. Broken. Useless. His back aches under the strain of old injuries, freshly exacerbated, and his knee has almost completely given out. It feels like the joint’s been injected with shattered glass. Time doesn’t exist. 

Time had forgotten this place.

Until he came. Until Bane brought him here.

_Your Ducard permitted you too much, Mr. Wayne. You both failed the League. The League is mine now, and I shall not fail Ra’s al-Ghul as you did..._

The only illumination his new life has, besides the sun, rising above the well walls for a scant few hours a day, is a TV. Installed up on the wall, installed behind a thick wire grate.

_Death is too easy. You must be made to suffer..._

Counting down Gotham’s remaining days. Counting down to Gotham’s destruction.

His failure. Bane’s success.

_... when Gotham is ashes, then you have my permission to die._

No wonder Ra’s didn’t want him anymore.

 _Crime cannot be tolerated_ , he hears Ra’s whisper.

_Henri..._

_Bruce, Bruce, look at me._

Lifting fevered eyes from the rough blanket of his bed. 

To the sight of Henri, the man whom he loved, who he’d once thought loved him. 

The same way he was when first he saw him, finding him in that gray prison in the roots of the Himalayas, and for a moment, Bruce thinks that he might be back there, that day, that day when Ra’s brought him back to life...

“Henri,” he croaks, sitting up, wishing he had the strength to stand up, embrace his former lover. “Henri, I saw you die...” He can’t forget that. It’s burnt into his memory, carved onto his soul, echoed in every dream he’s ever had since that horrible day. He never realized, never knew. 

_...whatever your original intentions, you have become truly lost..._

“I am lost,” he says desperately, trying to reach out for the man standing before him, wishing he could go to him, go with him. And he feels his dead mentor touch him, stroke him, take him in hand as he once had, make him anew... “I am lost without you.” He feels despair wash over him. "How are you here, Henri? You died, I saw you die..."

Henri regards him with eyes cold and blue as the ice of the glaciers, where he taught him the necessity of death, and looks up to the television. Day twenty-three of the siege. “I told you, Bruce. Ra's al-Ghul cannot be destroyed. He is eternal...”

And Bruce wakes in a cold sweat to the gray dawn of the prison. Runs a clammy hand through his lank hair. Fights to breathe.

Feels a chill in his very soul.

It’s the same thing. Every night. Every time he closes his eyes. Henri. His mountains, his home. His murder at the hands of Bane. 

His mind, trying to tell him something, trying to pull together the loose ends of something he should already know.

But it doesn’t come. He can’t remember. Whatever truth he’d found in his last days in Gotham, the capture and the beatings and this pit itself has pulled it from him.

Taken it.

Turned it to ash.

The days try to blur together, but the TV measures them out into even, miserable units. Bruce tries not to pay attention to it - Gotham’s death is inevitable. He can’t escape from this fucking pit - _only one_ , they tell him _has ever made it, a child, a child born in darkness, stronger than some soft man born into privilege_...

And even if he did... why? The League has set the date of its execution. _Gotham’s time has come_. He remembers Ra’s saying that. So long ago. Back before... before everything had fallen into darkness like this.

It’s hard, sometimes, to remember what happened back there in Gotham to bring him here, here to a more ancient corner of the world, where the land itself dreams of civilizations long vanished under the weight of their decadence, and structures like this subterranean prison can still exist. 

The family fortune is gone. He can recall that. The careful work and sacrifice and skill of hundreds of years of Waynes, the legacy he had never cared for as he should have, vanished off the back of a motorcycle on the Gotham expressways. His company is gone, Tate in charge now, her dream of clean energy turned into a mobile weapon of terror, prowling the streets, guarded by his own machinery. There was a woman - black hair, flashing eyes, thin and beautiful and scared and weak. The same one who stole his fingerprints. The one who he’d discovered was working with Bane, who he thought might be able to help him, who’d seemed sincere about getting out, getting free, of the criminal world. The one he’d gone to, after John - his brave Robin, who’d never had the chance to truly spread his wings - had...

There had been something John was trying to tell him, or told him accidentally, or almost told him but failed to actually say. Something. 

But every time he gets close to it, it vanishes. Grows cold. Dies.

Like everything else in him is dead now.

And he’s left alone again, with nothing but the stories and ramblings and silences of his fellow inmates, the ones who Bane has put in charge of watching him, of making sure he understands the full depth of his failure with Gotham.

He does. Fuck, how he does know how badly he’s failed.

Not in the way they think, though. Their crimes are heinous, but they have no idea that what he regrets most is not following through on Ra’s al-Ghul’s plan. On not killing twelve million people.

Just so Bane wouldn’t have killed one man. 

The only person he’s ever loved...

On day thirty-six of the siege of Gotham - as the news stations are calling it, while the asshole of a president America’s got sits on his hands and does nothing - Bruce has that dream again.

Him. 

Ducard.

_Gotham must be destroyed..._

But this time, John’s there instead. Or he’s with John, that night in Gotham, that last night, before Selina Kyle took him to the sewers and trapped him with Bane and watched. Just watched...

John, in that cramped little apartment of his, almost ashamed, almost shy. Almost...

__I’m not Ra’s... you were his fucking heir..._ _

His lover smiles at him from the shadows. 

“I told you Ra’s al-Ghul was eternal,” he says. “I am immortal, Bruce. Through Henri. Through you.”

“No,” he stammers back, the realization hitting him in a wave of despair. “Henri... he... he was telling me to leave, that he didn’t...”

“He was telling you it was time,” his lover whispers, and touches his cheek, achingly familiar, words like ash in the wind. “Gotham’s time. Yours...”

And that's when he realizes.

That's when the jagged pieces come together in his mind, and he finally understands the depth of his mistakes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. “Fuck, Henri, why didn’t you tell me?”

 _But he did_ , his traitorous mind whispers to him. _He did, and you were too fucking selfish to listen..._

When Bruce wakes in the morning it should be to grief. But all he feels is anger.

He is going to get the fuck out of here. He is. He is not going to die here.

The only person, they’ve already told him, to ever escape this place was a child. The child of a mercenary, whose lover took his punishment upon herself, who gave birth there. Ra’s al-Ghul’s child. 

_Bane_ , the stories - here and in Gotham and everywhere - say. _Bane_. 

_Innocence cannot survive in darkness_ , they say and Bruce remembers the picture that Henri used to keep on his desk of a young woman with exotic features, pretty, smiling. How almost... wistful Henri had been.

He remembers Miranda Tate. 

He remembers his lover’s daughter. His lover’s Talia. Who’d chosen another over her father. Who... 

_A man not worthy of the place in which you now stand..._

He has to get out of here. Kill that motherfucker Bane. Kill the bitch who had her lover kill her own father, who'd killed the legacy of his own family. Destroy the evil in Gotham, as he'd promised he once would. 

And take the League back. Take what was supposed to be his, what he had been chosen to lead, what he never should have given up so easily, what he was too blind or foolish or unwilling to see. 

He failed Henri... Ra’s... once. He’ll be damned if he does it again. Not now. Not now that he knows...

Oh yes, he’s angry.

It’s not what he used to feel, not the blinding, searing heat of being close to Henri... Ra’s... fuck, it was always Ra’s... Ra’s fucking al-Ghul...

 _Henri, why didn’t you tell me?_ he wonders, and wonders if he’s still that weak, fearful, angry thing that that nobel man dug out of a prison all these years ago...

But at least, in the absence of love, that anger will work just fine.

It’s pretty much the same emotion anyway. The same blast-furnace of passion. Just churning out darker materials. And darkness he can do. Just fine. 

Even if he keeps hearing those words, all through getting his weakened muscles working again, his knee cooperating, his back to shut the fuck up and behave. The ones Bane so carelessly laughed at him, threw at him, as he beat him half to death in the sewers of Gotham. 

_You’ve only adopted the darkness. I was born in it. I was a man grown before I saw the light..._

Bruce falls on the first attempt. Day forty-one. It hurts like hell when the rope catches him.

He watches the news. 

Ignores the savaged flesh, scraped raw over his ribs from where the hemp fibers saves his life, and goes again.

Day forty-nine. He falls again. This time, he hits the wall, wakes up in his cell. They tell him it’s now day fifty. 

He doesn’t have that much time.

He failed to avenge his parents.

He can’t fail Ducard. Ra’s.

Not again. Not ever again. 

_Anger_ , says the old doctor, the opium addict, the man who’s been taking care of him, _will not be enough. You need fear_.

“I am afraid,” he says, “of dying here, while my lover goes unavenged. While... while the League is headed by a madman who has no right to it.”

“Then make the climb as she did,” the old prisoner says dully, glassed, stoned just enough to tell him the truth now. “Without the rope. And fear will find you again.” 

Bruce reaches that last ledge. The long jump. Closed his eyes, breathes deep, focuses over the clamor of his own mind, telling him this is impossible, that he’s too weak, too privileged... 

But he knows the truth about himself. That Bane may have been banished here, that Talia may have grown up here, that they were both formed in the darkness of the earth. But he had grown up, dwelt, in the darkness of his own soul. 

A darkness far more absolute than any the outer world can offer. 

One that he’s overcome. 

Overcome, without being dragged in to its horrors.

He makes the jump. 

He makes the last leg of the climb.

And he’s free.

The desert mountains stretch out around him, the heat of the day brushes his face, the rays of the afternoon sun burn the cold from his rough clothing. He feels reborn. 

He feels...

A citadel stands, not a quarter mile away, and already he can hear them blowing the alarm, see the gates being flung open, a contingent of men on horseback sent out to the pit, to the prisoner who's dared to rise from it.

He feels strangely calm. 

They’re the League's men, after all. 

His. 


	8. Chapter 8

“Step forward those who would serve...”

Bane comes.

Wayne Enterprises loses its nuke.

The Batman doesn't resurface.

And people die. 

A lot of people die.

It starts with the rich. Of course it does. That whole movement was about that. Class warfare. Rip the city apart by the perforations in its pay stubs. Years of frustration - no doubt stirred up by Bane and the League - coming to the fore. The news wants to make it sound noble, John thinks to himself, watching the first of the riots on TV the morning after the stadium bombing, the crowd tearing into the financial district, but he knows better than that. 

It starts with the rich, but this thing that’s been unleashed, this dark little piece of human nature, is going to consume them all. From the guilty, to those whose only crime was having more, to those who thought their complicity would protect them, to those who have no skin in Bane’s sick little game. Normal people, regular people, people who want nothing more out of life than to sit down at dinner with the family and watch some bullshit television show on Thursday nights. 

After the mobs eat their way through the brownstones and the high street, those people will be next.

Everyone.

Bruce might have thought this was a League action, but Blake knows better. The League only kills the guilty. 

He’s pretty sure the people getting drug out in the street and lynched - men, women, children - aren’t the guilty in this particular situation.

It’s not the League, then.

Which means he has a right, a duty, to stop it.

Blake puts his uniform away - hides it, really - and wishes he could use that _wakazashi_ that Bruce was training him on. _Maybe it’s time_ , he thinks, but Gordon needs protecting and so does the city and the remnants of the police force are his best chance of pulling that off. So he sticks to his side-arm and starts scrounging the willing and uses Gordon’s name to build his own little resistance force.

And then Gordon’s letter gets read. About Dent. What he did. What he became. Live. On the national news. Across the country, people hear Gotham’s shame. 

“One day, you may face such a moment of crisis and in that moment I hope you had a friend like I did!. To plunge their hands into the filth so you can keep yours clean!” Gordon snaps when Blake confronts him about it, as the shocked anchors on CNN don’t know what the hell to say as prisoners begin pouring out of Blackgate, released by the very civilians whom they used to terrorized, released to the wild free-for-all Gotham has become. 

“Your hands look pretty dirty to me, Commission.”

“I was trying to fight the mob!”

“Somebody was trying to fight the mob, but it wasn’t you, was it? And you betrayed everything he stood for.”

Gordon says nothing. But he can see. He can see the guilt in his eyes. The weakness. He never believed, Blake realizes, not _he_ does. Bruce. Bruce was right. The police, the system, the government, it doesn’t have the strength to do what needs to be done. Doesn’t have the conviction. 

He hopes like hell that, wherever Bruce is, when he comes back, he’ll bring the League with him.

“I should kill you,” Blake says. Flat. Matter-of-fact. And it’s true, even if he knows that, right now, he couldn’t do it. The Commissioner’s eyes widen. “But we still need you.”

The killing ratchets up. 

Selina Kyle finds them, with offers to help. She looks haunted. Makes sense - she's been working for Bane. Blake takes her aside the first opportunity he gets, corners her in some back room in the basement they’re using as a base this week.

“Do you have any news about him, any idea at all?” he asks her.

Her voice grates against her guilt as she answers. “I don’t know, John, I just... I don't know.”

Blake leaves her. He can’t stand to look at her. All the goddamn weakness around him.

_Bruce, where the fuck are you?_

Snows come with the first of November. Early. It puts something of a damper on the wanton, random killings. Lootings continue. The courts continue. They hunt the nuke and try to keep order, try to kill Bane’s men when they can, try to keep people from rioting at the supply caravans. Resistance members - private citizens, cops, military at home on leave, normal people, all of them normal people - begin to lose faith. Gordon begins to lose faith. But not Blake.

Bruce is going to come back.

Bruce will be here.

Bruce is going to stop this fuckery.

Before the bomb counts down.

That’s something they learn from Fox, from Tate, when they finally track down the remaining members of the Wayne Enterprises board. The bomb’s on some kind of half-life timer. Gotham’s days are numbered. 

He has to explain that to the asshole Rangers who come in to help deal with the situation. Three months, and the government only sends in three men to help. It would piss Blake off, as would their stupid appeasement idea, except he knows they’re not going to be of any help anyway. Even with all they’ve done, all they’ve seen, he doesn’t see the conviction in them that he always saw in Bruce. That he feels in himself.

Blake still feels bad when they’re hung from the bridges. _Like meat_ , he thinks.

Disgusting.

However much he hopes that Bruce, seeing it, might find a way to return.

Hunger and cold, illness and chronic exhaustion, replace anger as the driving forces in Gotham. As the primary killers. Almost everybody over the age of eighty is gone, they’re estimating, the disabled and the medically dependent. The hospitals aren’t getting the power or supplies that they need. Lack of food is an issue. Lack of medication is far, far worse.

One of the boys, diabetic, at St. Slytherin’s dies when Blake can’t get to the weekly supply truck in time. He knows the insulin he failed to steal saves somebody else, but that’s small comfort as he stares into the accusatory faces of the boys he’d promised he’d help.

“Batman’s coming back,” he tells them, not knowing what else to say, not knowing if he can believe it right now himself, “and he’s going to bring the wrath of God with him when he comes.”

He doesn’t go back to base that night. He can’t. Can’t let anyone see him like that. And before Blake realizes where he’s going, he finds himself in Old Town, at Selina Kyle’s door.

Finds himself being let in.

“The world’s on fire,” he says, when she asks why he’s there. “The whole fucking world’s on fire.”

“Not everything,” she whispers, and opens an arm for him, lets him in, lets him lose himself for a little while, escape the horrors unfolding outside. He smells her hair and feels the softness of her sweet, small breasts, and lets her undress him, and gasps when he’s inside of her.

But it still takes everything he has not to breathe Bruce’s name when he comes.

The next day, the Board is caught. Along with Gordon. And the bomb’s due to go off in less than twenty four hours.

Blake decides its time. Time to act. Time to fix this. Time to end it. So he goes to release the cops. But that doesn’t exactly go as planned, and he finds himself flat on his back at the bottom of a stopped-up tunnel entrance, six guns pointed at his head, nothing he can reach for as a weapon.

 _Bruce_ , he thinks, _would be so ashamed of me_.

But then there’s the sound of steel slicing through the air and the sound of blood gurgling onto the snow-covered ground and he looks up to see the Batman. 

Bruce.

Blade in hand.

Dropping all six of them before any one of them can reach for a radio.

Relief washes over him and through him, and Blake feels cocky for the first time in months. “You missed a spot!” he calls out, and Bruce doesn’t even bother looking as he slices the fucker’s head clean off.

Drawing himself up, Blake can feel his heart pounding as the Batman prowls toward him. _Finally_ , he’s thinking, _finally somebody’s going to stop this madness_.

Blacked-out eyes consider him for a moment. “If you’re to be working alone, you should wear a mask,” he finally says.

“I’m not afraid being seen standing up to these guys.”

“The mask is not for you. It’s to protect the people you care about.”

He reaches out. Wraps a hand around the back of his cowl and pulls himself closer to all that midnight kevlar. “You’re the people I care about. The only people I care about,” he whispers into the older man’s mouth. “The League. You. Ra’s...”

There’s a jerk, Bruce stiffening, but Blake literally can’t stand it a moment longer, and kisses him.

It’s hard and biting and entirely too short, and Blake can taste blood in his mouth when Bruce pulls away. Touches his hair, his neck, his face. Caressing him, really. There’s no feeling in those gloves and Blake wonders what’s going through his mind right now.

“Gotham needs it’s true hero,” he whispers, not even knowing where the words are coming from, just that they need to be said.

Bruce doesn’t say anything for a long minute. And then... “You were right. About Henri. About me.” And those dark eyes harden. “No more hiding in the shadows, Robin. Either of us. Agreed?”

The use of his true given name startles him almost as much as the next kiss that leaves him shaken to the core. And Blake nods, wondering what in hell he’s talking about, where he’s been, why he’s back, what he’s been through.

“So what’s next?”

“An all out assault on Bane,” Bruce growls.

 _About goddamn time_ , Blake thinks.

+++++

People are dying in the streets. Pitched battle. Cops, the resistance’s men - Blake’s men. Bane’s men.

 _It’ll end soon_ , Bruce tells himself.

Kill Bane. Kill Talia. De-arm that fucking bomb. 

His plan is going to work.

Of course his plan is going to work.

He finds Bane in the melee, inhuman, monstrous, clearly in love with his killing. No wonder Henri... Ra’s... excommunicated him.

Bruce wasn’t sure, on the long trip back from that mountainous corner of India, how he would feel at this moment. How it would be to face off the man who he’d claim something that was always supposed to be his. Kill his lover, his teacher, his master, and escape into the night.

It doesn’t take much. He barely even notices. But he drops Bane in fifteen seconds flat, massive body thumping dead at his feet, head rolling away into the crowd.

And everything stops. The entire mass of screaming, dying humanity.

_Situation corrected._

He doesn’t even bother with subtlety. He already wiped the make-up off his eyes, and approaching Bane now, takes the entire cowl off and lets it fall away.

 _People need a symbol_ , he’d said once to Ra’s.

 _Gotham needs its true hero,_ Blake - his angry, vicious, strong, beautiful, Blake - said to him last night.

That symbol, right now, takes everything to a standstill. Stopped by the sight of Bruce Wayne standing on the courthouse steps, holding the Batman’s weapon with the familiarity of an old lover. He knows the fighters in the crowd who came from the League - he has files on all of them, read up on the long flight back, and he scans them now. Lets them know that he knows them. Knows who is weak, who is strong, who will die here today and who is worth saving. 

_Oh yes_ , he smiles to himself. _They all know._

“I am Ra’s al-Ghul of the League of Shadows, and I claim the actions that Bane has taken in my name as mine to correct,” he says, raising his voice only slightly, hearing it echo out away from him, across that mass. “The lives of his men who do not, this second, lay down their weapons and swear fealty to the true League, your lives are forfeit. The bomb will be returned immediately to its housing. The occupation of Gotham is over.”

The clattering of guns to the ground is almost deafening.

Somebody sprints for a radio - as he figured they might.

“And find the women Miranda Tate and Selina Kyle,” he adds. “Immediately.”

Bruce ignores the shocked murmurings, the fear and the surprise and the gratitude - most of all the gratitude - going up from the crowd as he pushes through them to one of the captured Tumblers, where Blake is waiting for him.

He gets a call, five minutes later, on his way to Bane’s kangaroo court, from Fox.

“Bomb disarmed,” Blake reports.

“Just get us to Bane’s stronghold,” he orders.

Talia and Selina are both there when they come in, standing in front of some antique gold chair, bound, gagged. A small crowd gathered. Gordon among them.

They lock eyes, and the commissioner just nods. Bruce can’t help but smile back. 

This city is going to come to its senses today. Whether it fucking likes it or not.

“For your crimes against the people of this city, the League’s judgment is death.”

Talia’s quick. The defiance in her eyes at the end reminds him of the pit. He’s glad to see them close forever.

But Selina, the woman who betrayed him, who made her life as a thief, is looking at him like she expects redemption. Like she somehow deserves it.

 _No mercy, Bruce_ , he hears Henri whisper in his ear.

He knows Blake has to have killed in the last five months. That the time has not been kind to anyone. That everything he’d hoped Blake could be has been tempered pure by the experience. That he’s a worthy addition to the League now. But he needs to see it. Needs to watch it. Needs to know that he can kill in the name of justice, and not just self-defense.

“You prepared to do all that is necessary?” he asks.

And Blake sets his jaw, nods, opens his hand. “Yes,” he says, even though he’s shaking a little.

They leave the bodies. Worthless things that they are. He knows they’ll be tidied away later, but he wishes they could stay there. Rot. For everyone to see what happens to those that victimize others.

But it’s alright. 

“Order re-established,” Gordon says calmly, and doesn’t even ask why either of them had to die. He looks at Bruce. Smirks a little. “I hope I didn’t have anything to do with this transformation of your, Mr. Wayne.”

“You gave a little boy comfort when he needed it,” he replies. “I’ll expect you’ll do the same for Gotham now.”

“Always.” And it sounds like a vow he can believe.

There’s a crowd outside the building as they leave it, with more people pouring in from everywhere. A news crew. All wearing the same disbelieving expressions. Word traveled fast, he observes. _Bane must have left the cell phone infrastructure intact._ Probably to help him organize his riots...

One of the reporters there on scene follows him, microphone at hand. He vaguely recognizes her. Probably did a puff piece at some point, he thinks, and she’s on him. “Vicki Vale, Gotham News,” she blurts out, getting in front of him. He stops. She looks down at the _wakazashi_ in his hand - drawn, bloodied - and pales a bit. 

She definitely did a puff piece on him at some point.

“Are you, Bruce Wayne, the Batman? Can we confirm that?”

He just nods. “

She gets paler, but braves on. “Shouldn’t you be in jail for the things you’ve done?”

“The League has looked after this city for a long time,” he tells her, and, thinking of something else, smiles a little. “And will continue to do so under my command. It’s what keeps people like you safe.”

And Blake pulls her gently aside, and away they go.

He knows in his gut that he’ll never set foot in Gotham again.

No need.

Other things demand his attention now.

And with his Robin walking beside him, he feels - oh god, how he feels - that fire Henri Ducard kindled burning in his heart once more.

+++++

“Why didn’t you bring back-up?” Blake asks that night, tearing himself away from the stars beyond the Gulfstream’s windows. It’s a League plane, piloted with League men. They’re alone. Headed towards one of the League's secluded fortresses. Give it all a chance to die down a little, before going back to what needs to be done. All those things that need their new master's attention. Bruce had already arranged everything in Gotham that needed his personal attention - the mansion and the remainder of the Wayne fortune was left to the city for the care of orphaned youth, like they had been before they found each other. Bruce's butler, Alfred, is long gone, Fox probably already on a plane to join him. His badge is at the bottom of the East River. He didn't have anything he cared enough about to pick up, anybody he cared enough about to say goodbye to. He's free now. Freed from the bureaucracy, all the idiocy, the failures and the weaknesses... _When systems become shackles..._

The rest of the men - the ones Bruce let live - are in a separate aircraft, headed for one of the training facilities in the Himalayas. They’ll have to prove themselves all over again.

 _And you made your bones today_ , he thinks to himself. _Killing a woman you’d slept with..._

The first woman he'd ever slept with. The first person he's ever killed.

Somewhere, in another life, in another world, in some weaker place, he'd be weeping for himself. For that. For all of this.

But not this one.

It's a small price to pay. Here. Now. Like this. For Bruce. He’d give anything for Bruce.

Bruce, who’s silent right now. Bruce, who’s battered and bruised and clearly feeling the pain from his bad leg. Bruce, who’s distant as the moon.

Bruce, who has never looked more at peace than he does right now.

Bruce, who will never be Bruce Wayne again. Not after today. Not after what has to be ricocheting around the world. Right the hell now. 

Smiling a little to himself, Blake gets up and slides across the narrow floor of the private jet, kneels down in front of his mentor and master and brother and lover and fellow orphan from the dregs of Gotham’s despair and lays his hands on tired knees. Pushing them apart. Untying the complicated knot on those black _hakama_ the League’s commander is wearing right now. Pulls out his cock, and places a kiss on the very tip.

“I love you, Ra’s al-Ghul,” he says quietly, honestly, and takes him in.

A hand fists in his hair and fingers dig at his scalp and before he can finish he’s yanked up, pants yanked down, spread across that strong lap, and the man born from the ashes of Bruce Wayne kisses him, hard, hard, hard as the plane continues silently into the night.

Taking them both home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay in finishing, and thanks to whoever hung in there with me on this!


End file.
